Credit One Bank® Platinum Rewards Visa® with No Annual Fee review: Starter cash back card for people with good credit

If you’re a student, the Discover it® Student Chrome easily beats the Credit One Platinum Rewards Visa. For one, you can apply without a credit history, making it easily accessible to beginners. On top of offering 2 percent cash back on gas stations and restaurants (on up to $1,000 in combined purchases each quarter, then 1 percent) with no annual fee, it also has an intro APR offer on purchases. Add with the welcome offer, where all your cash back earned in the first year is matched by Discover at the end of the first year, you get far more on this card.

Compared to the Platinum Rewards Visa, Discover it® Student Chrome has only one drawback: it has limited spending categories where you can earn cash back.

Instead of earning bonus cash back in specific categories, the Capital One QuicksilverOne Cash Rewards Credit Card earns unlimited 1.5 percent cash back on all card purchases. There's no need to keep track of card spending over multiple categories — all spending earns the same cash back rate. Like Credit One, Capital One allows you to see if you are pre-approved for the QuicksilverOne, and you may only need fair credit to qualify for approval.

However, the QuicksilverOne card carries a $39 annual fee (See Rates & Fees) and a slightly higher interest rate than the Credit One card. And like the Credit One Platinum Rewards Visa, this card has no welcome offer or intro APR. Nevertheless, the card has several other benefits that may outweigh its annual fee, like free credit score monitoring through CreditWise, virtual card numbers, and no foreign transaction fees (See Rates & Fees). If you prefer a card with more perks and don't mind a low annual fee, the QuicksilverOne may be the better choice. 

A student or credit-building card’s cost has a large influence on its overall score. 

Students already face a ton of expenses, so extra card costs are best avoided if possible, and people with limited or damaged credit tend often find the cards they can qualify for are much pricier than traditional credit cards designed for people with a good or better credit score. 

We compare a card’s total cost, including any annual fees, account activation fees, monthly fees and more against the total cost of other cards in this category and assign each card a score based on its affordability. We also factor rewards-earning potential into our assessment of a credit-building card’s total cost, subtracting a card’s expected earnings from the sum of its fees. 

To get a sense of a card’s rewards-earning potential, we estimate its average annual rewards rate and average annual earnings based on the most popular spending categories (as covered in the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer spending report). 

However, we use a slightly lower spending assumption ($300 per month or $3,600 per year) to estimate average earnings, assuming students and credit-builders will start out with a lower credit limit, will want to keep credit utilization low and will focus primarily on small purchases they can easily pay off.

Given the many costs students face — from textbooks to laptops — the presence of an introductory APR on purchases or balance transfers also plays a role in a student card’s score.

A card’s APR is also a major factor in its credit-building score. Each card’s average APR is compared against the average APR of other cards in the category, and the cards with lower-than-average APRs receive a higher rating. 

Though high APRs are hard to avoid when you’re just starting out or working on your score, credit-builders should strive for as low an APR as possible since they’re likely to either be new to managing cards or trying to establish better financial habits and avoid falling into debt.

Along with a credit-building card’s cost, our rating system takes into account how easy the card makes it to build credit. To assess this, we evaluate its credit limit potential and minimum deposit requirement.

Unsecured cards with a high starting credit limit and secured cards that let you put down a large deposit and get a matching high credit limit will score the highest according to our “Ease of building credit” rubric and are more likely to appear on our list. 

This is because a high credit limit can make it much easier to keep your credit utilization low, a primary credit-building factor that makes up 30 percent of your FICO credit score. 

Secured cards have a slight advantage in this category since the maximum credit limit on a secured card tends to be much higher than the typical starting credit limit on an unsecured card that’s available with a bad or fair credit score. However, unsecured credit-building cards have the upper hand in another key aspect of building credit: accessibility. 

Cards that carry no or a low deposit requirement can also receive a high score according to our “Ease of building credit” rubric since these cards offer a lower barrier to entry than secured cards that require you to put up hundreds of dollars in an upfront deposit. 

Indeed, some users may prefer to pay a non-refundable $50 annual fee while they work on their credit score than tie up hundreds in a refundable security deposit.

We also evaluate each card’s benefits based on how useful they are for students or someone looking to build a positive credit history and save money on everyday spending. 

We consider the inclusion of a rewards program, student-centric perks and access to your credit score or a credit monitoring service of prime importance, along with the ability to prequalify for the card with only a soft credit pull and a clear path to increase your credit limit or graduate to an unsecured or full-fledged rewards card.

Cards that include these benefits are likely to score higher according to our credit-building card scoring rubric.