Deutsche Bank Classic
CancelSixty paise a point, or one Jet Airways mile — from a card that cost nothing at all.
no published earn rate to price
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. Everything we can source — the fee, the charges, the migration that put this card in your hand — is above and stands on its own; this card is simply not on the board, not in the calculator, and cannot win a best-of call until Deutsche Bank publishes terms we can cite.
Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · why it ranks #946
Why #946 Deutsche's free starter card, and a free way onto its rewards programme: a point was worth ₹0.60 in cash or one JPMile, and the card cost nothing to hold. Carried for the record; the Indian card book went to IndusInd in 2011.
The take
The Classic was the bottom rung of Deutsche Bank India's shelf and, judged as a free card, an unusually complete one. Nil to join, Nil to renew, Nil for add-ons — all three published in the bank's own Schedule of Charges — and it still carried the rewards programme, the insurance and the fuel waiver of the paid cards above it. Its redemption was published outright: a point was worth ₹0.60 against your outstanding, or one airline mile. The named route was JPMiles, Jet Airways' programme, and the page carried the conversion link directly. Set that against the SmartGold's ₹0.50 and the Platinum's ₹0.85 and Deutsche's cash ladder turns out not to track the fee ladder at all — the other free card redeemed worse than this one, and only the ₹10,000 Platinum redeemed better. Around it: up to five add-on cards for dependants sharing the primary limit, a statement cycle you picked from three windows, the 2.5% fuel surcharge waived on transactions between ₹400 and ₹4,000 with 2.5 reward points earned on fuel besides, Total Protection covering unauthorised transactions to the full credit limit including the 48 hours before you reported a loss, and an image-personalised card face. It is carried and not ranked because the general accrual was never published. Deutsche states what a point was worth and what fuel earned, and never states what a hundred rupees of ordinary spend earned under any savings plan. That number did not survive, and this desk does not invent one. The house currency itself is unmodelled here for the same reason it is on every Deutsche card: the bank is gone, and so is the programme.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
There is no renewal arithmetic to run on this card yet — and a break-even we cannot source is not one we will print.
the whole desk — what changed, the downgrade, and what we cannot price →
Keep, downgrade or cancel
what we can and cannot price
Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes how it earns — every net-value number here would be a fee subtracted from rewards nobody has described. A break-even is the spend at which value crosses a fee, and we are short one side of that sentence — so this desk prints no ladder, no crossing and no ₹0 standing in for either. What we can source about this card is under Sources.
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
Deutsche 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 we cannot price either side of it.
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
- Nil to join, Nil to renew and Nil for add-ons on Deutsche's published Schedule of Charges — genuinely lifetime free
- A reward point was worth ₹0.60 against your outstanding, or one airline mile
- Points converted into JPMiles, Jet Airways' frequent-flyer currency
- 2.5 reward points on fuel, on top of the 2.5% fuel surcharge being waived between ₹400 and ₹4,000
- Up to five add-on cards for dependants — spouse, parents, parents-in-law, siblings or children over 18
- Pick your statement cycle from three windows: the 2nd–5th, 7th–10th or 12th–15th of the month
- Total Protection against unauthorised transactions to the full credit limit, covering the 48 hours before you reported a loss
Watch out
- WITHDRAWN — Deutsche Bank sold its Indian retail and credit-card business to IndusInd Bank in 2011, and Jet Airways has since ceased flying
- THE PRODUCT DID NOT DIE IN 2011 — IndusInd re-issued it under its own name on the same Nil fee row and sold it until at least 2019, cutting the point from ₹0.60 to ₹0.40 along the way; that successor is a separate file, indusind-classic
- Deutsche never published the general ACCRUAL on this card — only the redemption rate and the fuel earn — so what ordinary spend paid is genuinely unknown
- ₹0.60 a point was well under the ₹0.85 Deutsche printed on its Platinum cards — only the airline-mile leg, at one for one, was the same across the shelf
- Reward points were a Deutsche HOUSE currency this board does not model, so even the published redemption cannot be turned into a house value
- Add-on cards shared the PRIMARY card's credit limit rather than adding to it, and add-on holders got no complimentary insurance unless specified
- Revolving cost was 3.83% a month — an APR of 46% — on the last published schedule
- Foreign currency was charged at 3.5%, the full Indian norm
What these points actually fly
Deutsche Bank has not published what this card earns, so there are no points here to fly with — not zero points, and not points that go nowhere: nothing stated either way. The moment a benefit sheet exists we will price whatever it names.
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.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. Deutsche Bank sold its Indian retail banking and credit-card business to IndusInd Bank in 2011, and deutschebank.co.in has not served a credit-card page since. IndusInd kept selling the card under its own name for another eight years — see indusind-classic — and that one is gone too.
Deutsche Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
no MITC row researched for this card yet · filter the board by what you can get →
What's changed for this card
nothing tracked yet — which is itself a fact
No tracked devaluations or changes yet — this card's history starts here.
Verified against Deutsche Bank's own documents on
Not published , and we will not invent it: the earn rate and the currency it earns.
Every document behind this page — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official IndusInd Bank's bank-wide credit-card MITC, 2011 — the buyer's own fee table, carrying this card on the same Nil joining, Nil annual, Nil add-on row after the portfolio sale
- official Deutsche Bank India's Classic Credit Card page (archived 13-Sep-2008) — the reward programme, the JPMiles conversion, the add-on cards and the statement-cycle choice
- official Deutsche Bank India's Classic Credit Card benefits page (archived 07-Oct-2008) — the ₹0.60-or-one-mile redemption rate, the fuel earn, the add-on rules and the three statement cycles
- official Deutsche Bank India's Schedule of Charges for credit cards, effective 19 April 2010 — this card in the Nil-fee group, with 3.5% on foreign currency
- official Deutsche Bank India's own Cards shelf today — titled "Debit Cards for Every Need", it lists debit cards only and no credit card at all