It's, per the article, not really no annual fee, you can't get the card without paying them at least $50 a year for an account with them, where the cash ends up (and then you have to figure out how to extract).<p>On top of that the article makes the classic mistake of saying it pays for itself if you spend $166 a month, but it only <i>really</i> pays for itself if the marginal value of using the card over a generic 1.5% cashback card on the things you can't get 3% for already is more than $5 a month. Things like high cashback percentages for the first $X a month in specific categories make this intentionally hard to calculate, and are part of why I never really got into optimizing my credit card benefits. It's obnoxiously hard to compare.