You flashed your heavy-metal card at a wearable-tech store and got a discount. You nabbed a reservation at that impossible-to-book restaurant through your card’s app. You booked a discounted rideshare with a tap. Life is good when you’re a premium cardholder, or so the pitch goes.

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But behind the glossy perks and the satisfying weight of that card in your wallet lies an uncomfortable question: as annual fees soar to eye-watering new heights, are cardholders actually winning, or are they just paying more to be marketed to?

The fee creep is real

Premium card pricing has jumped sharply. Chase raised the Sapphire Reserve’s annual fee from $550 to $795 in June 2025, a 45% increase and more than 75% above the $450 fee when the card launched. American Express followed with a Platinum Card refresh that raised the annual fee from $695 to $895, a 29% increase.

The justification from issuers is always the same: more fees mean more benefits. But more benefits means a labyrinth of monthly statement credits, opt-in offers, and spending caps that require a spreadsheet—and a good memory—to fully redeem. Miss a month of your DoorDash credit? That “value” quietly evaporates.

“The higher the fee, the more benefits you tend to have,” said Chris Fred, Head of Credit Cards and Unsecured Lending at TD Bank. “It’s a dangerous proposition: you’d better start using those benefits, or it’s going to be really hard to justify the fee.”

Nick Ewen, editor-in-chief of The Points Guy, said he runs that math every year across his own cards. “When that annual fee posts for every single one of them, I actually sit down and do the math to identify, ‘Is this worth me keeping open based on the value that I get?’” Ewen told Fortune. “And that value is not based on things that I wouldn’t have otherwise used.”

A credit only counts as savings if it replaces money you were already going to spend. If a card nudges you into a subscription, hotel portal, restaurant, or wellness product you never would have bought otherwise, the benefit starts to look less like found money and more like manufactured spending.

“You have to look at the real value to you, not the dollar value that is put on it by a card issuer, because that can inflate the actual number,” Ewen said.

The perks seem like someone else’s ad budget

Both Fred and Ewen refer to the partner-cardholder-card issuer relationship as a “triple win.”

“Co-branded partnerships are a triple win for everyone involved,” Fred told Fortune. “Cardholders enjoy valuable perks and exclusive benefits from brands they already love.”

“I view a lot of these relationships as win-win-win, in the sense that it’s the card issuer and the partner, but then ideally it’s the cardholder as well who comes out ahead in terms of the benefits that they get from some of these programs,” Ewen said.

Cardholders get access to exclusive perks, like discounts when shopping or first dibs on restaurants and experiences. For card issuers, it’s another perk to offer that might justify a high fee. For those partners? It’s a customer acquisition strategy.

When Amex offers statement credits tied to Oura, Uber, Resy, or Lululemon, or when Chase bundles in subscriptions and hotel-program incentives, those companies are buying access to a lucrative audience. Reaching affluent, high-spending premium cardholders would otherwise cost those brands money in advertising and customer acquisition, but a card partnership gets them closer to the transaction itself.

These partnerships can introduce cardholders to brands they might not otherwise have tried, then encourage them to spend beyond the value of the credit. A $75 credit at a premium retailer, for example, may not go very far on its own, but it can be enough to get a consumer through the door.

“You might have someone who’s like, ‘Gosh, I’ve never bought Lululemon clothes before. Now I have this reason to go and do so,’” Ewen said. “All of a sudden, I have now discovered a new love, and now I’m going to wind up spending hundreds of dollars at Lululemon, as opposed to just the $75.”

Is it worth it?

American Express posted 2024 records across card spending and fees, with net card fee revenue reaching $8.4 billion, up 16% from $7.3 billion in 2023. Its annual report also said net card fees had grown at double-digit levels for 26 consecutive quarters.

Meanwhile, nearly 90% of consumers say rising prices have affected their spending, with 29% cutting back on nonessential purchases and 19% actively seeking discounts and promotions, according to TD Bank’s Consumer Spending Index.

This all raises the question of whether the benefits of these premium cards are worth the high annual fees. For Fred, most people are better off getting a 2% cash-back card and calling it a day, since they’re unlikely to have a spreadsheet to track all their benefits and points. “People think, ‘I can always beat that 2%.’ On average, they don’t,” Fred previously told Fortune. But for Ewen, w

Premium card perks are ‘designed to create a win-win-win for everyone’ but customers are paying with heavy annual fees and data