CheQ AU Credit Card
KeepIndia's only credit card with a light in it — and every reward percentage on its page is worth exactly half what it says.
a year at ₹40,000 a month, after the fee
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Welcome: Not published — AU and CheQ state no activation or sign-up benefit on this card
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied. Plus milestones, minus the fee. No accelerator credit — the ranking model on /compare adds ~20% of spend at the card's best accelerator, so its ₹ for this card reads higher.
How these numbers are computed — and why the rankings show a bigger one →
Spend tiers, milestones and fee waivers included, at our house ₹/point. Portal and category multipliers can push higher — run your exact number →
Pays from the first rupee
At ₹1,000 a month — ₹12,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against its ₹0 fee = ₹100 net — at or above ₹0 from the first rung we price. The ladder runs in ₹1,000 steps to ₹1,00,000 a month and ₹10,000 steps to ₹5,00,000; figures are rounded to the hundred, and the accelerator is never credited.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants
The take
The CheQ AU card is a genuine curiosity: a Visa card whose face lights up every time it goes through a POS terminal, which AU bills as India's first LED credit card. The card is lifetime free — nothing to take it, nothing to keep it — and the ₹999 that appears in the fee footnote buys the LED plastic itself, once, and only if you want it. Take the ordinary card and it costs nothing at all. The rewards are where you have to do arithmetic AU would rather you skipped. The page advertises "12% Rewards On Your Favourite Brands", "5% rewards" on a broad online list and "2.5% Rewards On CheQ UPI". Scroll down and the same page tells you what those rungs actually pay — 24 CheQ Points per ₹200, 10 per ₹200, 5 per ₹200 — and what a CheQ Point is worth: two of them buy a rupee of flights, hotels or gift cards from thirty-odd brands, and four of them buy a rupee off your bill. So a point is fifty paise, the "12%" is 6%, the "5%" is 2.5%, and the "1%" on everything else is half a percent. Every percentage on this card is exactly double the money, because AU is printing a point count with a percent sign after it. It does the same thing one URL over on ixigo AU, where "2.5%" is 1.25%. Read at the real numbers it is still a decent free card and a bad default one. Six percent back on Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato, BigBasket, Apple through Unicorn, and on flights, hotels and utility bills routed through the CheQ app, is genuinely strong for a card that costs nothing — but it is capped at 12,000 points a month, which is ₹6,000 of value and about ₹1 lakh of accelerated spend. Past that, and on everything the accelerators do not name, you are on the base rung earning half a percent, which is worse than most lifetime-free cards on this board. And every rupee of it is trapped: rewards land as CheQ Points in a CheQ account inside the CheQ app, not as statement cashback, and they die two years after they post. Load the app spending into it, keep a duller card for the rest.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card is lifetime free. There is no fee due, no renewal to weigh, and nothing to cancel to save.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
nothing due at the anniversary · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 — lifetime free
At your spend
₹1,500 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹3,000 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹6,000 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹18,000 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹30,000 a year at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, with no fee to subtract — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
The downgrade
AU Small Finance Bank publishes no document naming a card you can step down to, so we name none — an invented product change is a phone call you would waste. That leaves keep or cancel, and the numbers above are the whole of it.
What has changed under this card
- 7 Jul 2026 AU makes the CheQ AU card lifetime free, dropping ₹499 joining and ₹499 renewal
- 1 Apr 2026 AU stops paying reward points on transportation merchant codes issuer-wide
We price what is in force today — a change that has not happened yet is not in these numbers. the full archive for this card →
If you call to cancel
What the bank offers to keep you is the one fact this desk cannot compute. We are collecting those reports — dated, and only in aggregate — before publishing any: an offer one reader was made is not one you are owed. Called about this card? Tell us what they offered →
The desk publishes subscribable .ics feeds for the dates it knows — offer deadlines, devaluations, expiry audits. Your renewal date is not one of them: only your statement knows it.
What's good
- Lifetime free — 'Joining/Annual Fee: Lifetime free' on AU's own page
- India's first LED credit card: the Visa face illuminates on every POS transaction
- 24 CheQ Points per ₹200 — a real 6% — on Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato, BigBasket, Apple via Unicorn, and on flights, hotels and utility bills paid in the CheQ app
- 10 CheQ Points per ₹200 (2.5%) across online shopping, travel, food delivery and online grocery on a 10,000-brand list
- 2 CheQ Points per ₹200 (0.5%) on everything else, with no cap on the base rung
- Two CheQ Points buy a rupee of flights, hotels or gift cards from 30+ brands; four buy a rupee off a bill
- Fuel surcharge waiver up to ₹150 a statement month, on transactions between ₹500 and ₹5,000
Watch out
- EVERY percentage AU advertises on this card is double what it pays: a CheQ Point is ₹0.50, so "12%" is 6%, "5%" is 2.5% and "1%" is 0.5%
- Rewards are credited to a CheQ account inside the CheQ app, not as statement cashback
- The ₹999 + GST is a one-time charge for the LED card specifically — the ordinary card is free
- The accelerated rungs stop at 12,000 CheQ points a month (₹6,000 of value, roughly ₹1 lakh of accelerated spend); only the 0.5% base rung is uncapped
- The 6% brand rung needs the Visa variant, or the RuPay variant paid through CheQ UPI — the same spend on the wrong rail earns the base rate
- Utility payments and UPI made OUTSIDE the CheQ app earn nothing, and neither do fuel, education, gold, insurance, rent, EMI or gambling
- Nothing under ₹200 earns anything, and points expire two years after they are credited
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes CheQ Points into a programme that publishes an award chart. These points buy catalogue and portal redemptions, not award seats — so this page has no flight to show you, and will not invent one.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
Lounge access
0 of 793 tracked doors
No lounge access. This card opens exactly 0 of 793 tracked lounge doors — board with the crowd, or find a card that doesn't →
Can you get it?
the route in — no cutoffs published
The cutoffs and the actual route in — not the "apply now" button, the door that opens.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
AU Small Finance Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
per the official AU Small Finance Bank MITC — figures marked (community) aren't in the PDF; the issuer won't say · filter the board by what you can get →
The fine print
0 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
"Joining/Annual Fee: Lifetime free", with a footnote that ₹999 + GST is a one-time charge "applicable for LED Card only" — the ordinary plastic costs nothing, which is why the card file carries no joiningFee. India's first LED credit card: the Visa face illuminates on every POS transaction. THE EARN IS NOW PRICED (2026-08-23, superseding this note's older "unpriceable" reading): AU's page publishes the value — "2 CheQ Points = ₹1" on travel/shopping, "4 CheQ Points = ₹1" on bill payments — so the card file carries cheq-points at ₹0.50 (floor ₹0.25) and a full rung table; the rewards still land in a CheQ account rather than as statement cashback. AU's FAQ confirms a cap exists — "Yes, there is a cap on accelerated reward points, but not on base rewards" — without printing its figure. Points expire 2 years after they are credited. Fuel surcharge waiver up to ₹150.
per the official AU Small Finance Bank MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
What's changed for this card
8 dated changes
Devaluations and buffs that touch this card directly, its issuer, or the points and programs it earns and transfers to. Every one is dated here; the tracker carries each one's before → after and the write-up.
- 7 Jul 2026AU makes the CheQ AU card lifetime free, dropping ₹499 joining and ₹499 renewal"CheQ AU — Joining Fee ₹499 & Renewal Fee ₹499"; the LED variant "Joining Fee ₹1499 & Renewal Fee ₹499"; renewal waived by spending ₹3,00,000 in a year. → "CheQ AU Credit Card — Lifetime free (₹999 + GST one-time fee applicable for LED Card only)." CheQ no longer appears in the fee-waiver block at all, because there is no fee left to waive.
Caught as live drift on 24 August 2026 and dated to the document that carries it: AU's bank-wide MITC and Schedule of Charges, version 2.21, "Last updated on 7th July'2026". The previous edition — version 2.19, 16 May 2026, still served from a different path on AU's own site — prints the old numbers in the same table, which is what makes this a change and not a reading error. AU announced nothing. A ₹499 card becoming lifetime free is a real buff and the direction is worth naming, but price it honestly, because the fee was never the problem with this card. AU advertises the CheQ AU rungs as percentages — 12% on CheQ Travel and utility bills, 5% on online shopping, 1% on everything — and every one of those headlines is exactly double what it returns, because AU prints the POINT count with a percent sign and a CheQ Point is worth ₹0.50 at AU's own published redemption rates. The base rung AU calls "1%" pays 0.5%. Removing ₹499 a year from a card that returns half what its own page claims makes it a better free card, not a good one — and the earn still lands in a CheQ app account rather than on your statement, and expires two years from credit. ONE READING TRAP, since a later lane will hit it: three editions of this MITC sit at four URLs on au.bank.in, two of them differing only in filename case and punctuation, eight months apart. Only /credit-cards/mitc(with-schedule-of-charges).pdf serves v2.21. A drift check run against any of the others is a drift check against a stale table.
- 6 May 2026AU relaunches its card range — Ananta tops a new four-card deck
- 10 Apr 2026AU more than doubles its domestic-lounge spend gate to ₹50,000/quarter
- 1 Apr 2026AU stops paying reward points on transportation merchant codes
- 22 Dec 2024AU rewrites where the ixigo co-brand earns — four categories to nil, three to a reduced rate
- 1 Apr 2024AU zeroes out rewards on fuel, rent, education and government
- 21 Mar 2024AU unveils Zenith+ — a metal card built for the departure gate
- 5 Jul 2023AU Rewardz devalues vouchers 20% and tolls every redemptionE-vouchers at ₹0.25/point; free redemptions; uncapped Zenith earning → E-vouchers cut to ₹0.20/point; ₹99 + taxes per redemption; Zenith capped at 40k points/cycle (20k per category)
AU's first big rewrite of its points program hits from three directions at once: the e-voucher rate — the redemption most cardholders actually use — drops from ₹0.25 to ₹0.20 per point, every successful redemption now costs ₹99 plus taxes, and Zenith's earning gets a 40,000-point statement-cycle ceiling. A closed-loop currency with no transfer partners just got 20% smaller and pay-per-exit.
Every AU Small Finance Bank change we've dated → 9 events since 2021, 5 of them nerfs — worst year 2024.
Verified against AU Small Finance Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point