AU SPONT Credit Card
Keep1% on everything including UPI, ₹500 a month, and two airport lounges a quarter for ₹299.
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: 500 coins on your first UPI transaction made in the AU 0101 app — redeemable from the AU Rewardz catalogue, not credited as cash
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 for itself at ₹3,000 a month
At ₹3,000 a month — ₹36,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹400 gross (earn ₹400) against its ₹299 fee = ₹100 net — the first rung at or above ₹0. 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.
1 notes on the card itself: how it is issued
The take
SPONT is the most straightforward card AU makes: one per cent on everything, and the "everything" genuinely includes UPI made through any app, not only AU's own. That is rarer than it sounds — most Indian issuers either exclude UPI spend from rewards or confine the good rate to their own wallet. Cashback caps at ₹500 in a statement cycle, which is ₹50,000 of spend a month; above that the card stops paying, and there is no second rung to fall back on. For ₹299 the surrounding benefits are unusually good. Two complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a quarter, gated since 10 April 2026 on ₹50,000 of spend in the previous quarter — the same figure at which the cashback ceiling arrives, so a holder who maxes the cashback keeps the lounges. Two railway lounge visits a quarter on top, eight a year, with no spend gate stated. And a separate coin ledger for UPI transactions made inside the AU 0101 app: five coins a transaction, 500 for the first, redeemable from the AU Rewardz catalogue rather than as cash. There is no fee waiver at any spend — AU names SPONT in its fee list and in neither waiver table — so ₹299 is a real annual cost. At the ₹500-a-month ceiling it pays for itself twenty times over. The exclusions are the ones that always matter: fuel, rent, education, government, cash, EMI and insurance earn nothing at all.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
Here is the fee, the spend that clears it, and everything that has moved under this card since you last decided.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹299/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹299/yr
Break-even ₹3,000 a month — ₹36,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹2,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, minus the fee — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
Your copy of this card
You hold this card.
Kept on this device, in your browser. It is never sent to us, never synced, and nothing else on the site reads it yet.
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
- 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
- 1% cashback on everything — e-commerce, POS, contactless and UPI through any app
- 2 complimentary domestic airport lounge visits a quarter, on ₹50,000 of spend in the previous quarter
- 2 complimentary railway lounge visits a quarter, 8 a year
- 5 coins on every UPI transaction made in the AU 0101 app, and 500 on the first
Watch out
- Cashback stops at ₹500 a statement cycle — ₹50,000 of spend a month, then nothing
- No fee waiver at any spend: AU lists SPONT's ₹299 and names it in neither the first-year nor the renewal waiver table
- Fuel, rent, education and government, cash, EMI and insurance earn no cashback
- The airport-lounge benefit needs ₹50,000 of spend in the previous calendar quarter, a rule AU introduced on 10 Apr 2026
- 3.49% forex markup — AU's standard band and no better than the Indian norm
- The coins are a separate ledger redeemed from AU's catalogue, not cash added to the 1%
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Statement cashback (₹) 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
71 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: ₹50,000 of net retail spend in the previous calendar quarter for the airport visits (w.e.f. 10 Apr 2026); the railway visits carry no gate
Opens 71 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 32 airports and 19 railway stations , via DreamFolks Railway — see the full map →
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
2 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
ONE combined published charge — "Joining/Annual Fee: ₹299 + applicable taxes" — and NO reversal at any spend: AU names SPONT in its bank-wide fee list and in neither the first-year nor the renewal waiver table. 1% cashback on everything, including UPI made through ANY app, capped at ₹500 a statement cycle; fuel, rent, government and education, cash withdrawals, EMIs and insurance are excluded. A separate coin ledger pays 5 coins per UPI transaction made in the AU 0101 app, 500 on the first, redeemed from the AU Rewardz catalogue rather than as cash. 2 domestic airport lounge visits a quarter behind ₹50,000 of previous-quarter spend (effective 10 Apr 2026) plus 2 railway lounge visits a quarter. Fuel surcharge waiver max ₹100 a cycle.
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
Every document behind this page — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official AU's SPONT page — 1% cashback on every transaction including UPI with a ₹500-a-cycle cap, the quarterly airport and railway lounge visits, and the ₹299 joining-and-annual fee
- official AU's credit-card FAQ — SPONT's ₹299 fee, its absence from both waiver tables, and the 3.49% cross-currency mark-up
- official AU Usage T&C (w.e.f. 10-Apr-2026) — SPONT named in the domestic quota table at 2 visits a quarter, on AU's own 50+ room list; ₹50,000 prior-quarter gate
- official AU's own domestic lounge list for every card except Zenith+ — 50 rooms in 24 cities (Adani, Encalm, Travel Club, 080, Earth, Primus, Pearl, Blackberry, Airr)