Amazon Visa vs Chase Freedom Unlimited

Most of this site sends readers who do not want a Prime membership toward the Amazon Visa, because it earns at Amazon without one — Chase pays 3% back (Chase — Amazon Visa, verified 2026-08-11) at Amazon.com, Audible.com, Whole Foods Market and Chase Travel (Chase — Amazon Visa, verified 2026-08-11), with no membership condition in the wording.

What we had not done until now is put that card against the obvious alternative for the same reader. Freedom Unlimited is the other $0-fee Chase card most people consider, and it makes the opposite bet: a flat rate on everything rather than a high rate on one retailer. Both are $0 (Chase — Amazon Visa, verified 2026-08-11) a year, so the comparison is purely about where your money goes.

Read down that table and the Freedom Unlimited wins more rows. That is not the same as winning, because rows are not weighted by how much you spend in them. The only row that decides this is the Amazon one, and only in proportion to how big it is for you.

The arithmetic is simple enough to do in one line. At Amazon, the Amazon Visa earns 1.5 points more per dollar than the Freedom Unlimited. Everywhere else, it earns 0.5 points less. So the question is how much Amazon spending it takes to cover the shortfall on the rest.

The gaps are not large. At the extremes of that table the difference is $60 to $140 a year, which is real but is not the sort of margin worth reorganizing your finances over. That is a genuinely useful conclusion: for most readers these two cards are close enough that the tiebreakers below matter more than the rates.

There is a detail that changes the comparison for anyone planning to spend their rewards at Amazon, and Chase publishes it plainly: when using points at Amazon checkout, each point is worth $0.008, which means 100 points equals $0.80 in redemption value (Chase — Freedom Unlimited, verified 2026-08-12).

That is a 20% haircut on the redemption, and it applies to exactly the reader who is comparing these two cards in the first place. A year of 1.5% earning redeemed at Amazon checkout is effectively 1.2%, which pushes the crossover point well below 25%.

The haircut is avoidable — redeem the Freedom Unlimited’s rewards as cash back and pay for the Amazon order with the card as normal. Chase confirms Cash Back rewards do not expire as long as your account is open (Chase — Freedom Unlimited, verified 2026-08-12), so there is no rush that forces a bad redemption. But it is a trap that catches people precisely because Shop with Points looks like the natural thing to do. We go through it in more depth on the Prime Visa version of this comparison.

The Amazon Visa has no equivalent problem. Its rewards are the same fixed-value currency as the Prime Visa’s — Chase publishes 100 points = $1 (each $1 in % back rewards earned is equal to 100 points) (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11) — and they are worth the same cent everywhere, including at Amazon checkout.

Two rows in the first table favour the Freedom Unlimited by more than the rate difference does.

The 0% window. Chase advertises 0% intro APR for 15 months from account opening on purchases and balance transfers (Chase — Freedom Unlimited, verified 2026-08-12). The Amazon Visa carries no published intro offer, and its purchase APR is 18.74%–27.49% variable (Chase — Amazon Visa Pricing & Terms, verified 2026-08-13). If there is a planned large purchase in the next year that you intend to pay down over months, that window is worth more than any rate difference on this page — on a $3,000 balance it is comfortably into three figures of avoided interest.

The welcome offer. Chase advertises a $200 bonus after you spend $500 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening (Chase — Freedom Unlimited, verified 2026-08-12) against the Amazon Visa’s a $50 Amazon Gift Card loaded into your Amazon Gift Card balance on approval (Chase — Amazon Visa, verified 2026-08-11). That is a one-time difference of $150, which takes several years of rate advantage to recover at the margins we calculated above.

Neither of these is a reason to hold a card for a decade. Both are reasons to think about which one you open first, and that is a different question from which one is better.

Take the Amazon Visa if Amazon and Whole Foods together are more than a quarter of your card spending, you do not want a Prime membership, and you want the rewards to be worth a straightforward cent wherever you spend them.

Take the Freedom Unlimited if your spending is spread out, you eat out or use drugstores regularly, or you have a large purchase coming that would benefit from a 0% window. Redeem its rewards as cash back rather than at Amazon checkout.

Take both if you are willing to run two cards. Route Amazon and Whole Foods to the Amazon Visa and everything else to the Freedom Unlimited, and you get 3% and 1.5% respectively with no compromise on either. That is strictly better than either card alone, at the cost of two applications and two accounts to manage — the trade-off we work through on the page about holding two cards.

And if you are reconsidering the membership question, note what changes: with Prime, the Amazon rate goes from 3% to 5% back (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11), which moves this comparison decisively. That version is on the Prime Visa comparison.