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When can you downgrade your credit card?


If the annual fee just came due for one of your travel rewards cards, you may find it difficult to justify the expense if you’re not getting enough value in return. If you can’t maximize the card’s benefits, earning rates or redemption opportunities, there may be an option besides paying the annual fee, canceling your card or calling to see if you can snag a retention offer. That option is to downgrade your card.

As a result of provisions of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, you’ll generally need to wait until you’ve had your card for a year before you can downgrade it. However, some issuers have different policies, and there are also some other aspects to consider.

Here’s when you can downgrade your credit card account for most major card issuers — and when it might be a good option.

What does it mean to downgrade a card?

Downgrading your card means switching to another credit card offered by the same issuer with a lower annual fee (or none at all). Because you usually aren’t opening a new account, there typically won’t be a new inquiry on your credit report, and your online login information should stay the same.

You’ll receive a new physical card in the mail that may have a new card number, but your account history, credit limit and other major factors that affect your credit score shouldn’t change.

Hands of a Man Taking his Credit Card out of His Wallet to make on Online Order on his Laptop Computer
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You can save on annual fees by downgrading your premium cards. However, some issuers base your eligibility for welcome bonuses on which credit cards you’ve had open, not just which cards you’ve earned a bonus on. So be wary that downgrading a card might prevent you from earning a valuable future bonus.

Most issuers only allow you to upgrade or downgrade within a single family of cards. However, issuers may not offer the same downgrade options to all cardholders, and some of your cards may not have any downgrade options. Finally, while issuers may offer bonus points when you upgrade to a new credit card product, it’s unusual for an issuer to provide bonus points to downgrade.

Related: 11 major mistakes people make with travel rewards credit cards

When can you downgrade an American Express card?

American Express doesn’t publicly state a required waiting period before downgrading a card. However, it’s generally best to wait at least one year, as American Express has historically included language in its card offers warning that customers who cancel or downgrade cards within the first year could lose rewards or even have their accounts closed.

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American Express Centurion Lounge in Seattle. ZACH GRIFF/THE POINTS GUY

Amex also generally doesn’t allow product changes between personal and business cards, and you typically have to stay within the same card family (such as Delta SkyMiles, Hilton Honors or Marriott Bonvoy). To determine your options and request a downgrade, call the number on the back of your card or log in to your online account and chat with an Amex representative.

American Express has a “one bonus per lifetime” rule. But this rule can be worse than it sounds, as Amex also has some “family” rules that can prohibit you from earning a welcome offer on a card if you hold or have held a higher-tier card in the same family. Hence, it may make sense to downgrade to a card if you wouldn’t be eligible to earn a welcome offer on it anyway.

Related: 3 reasons to downgrade from the Amex Platinum to the Amex Gold

When can you downgrade a Chase card?

Chase may allow you to downgrade your card to another card within the same family if the account you want to downgrade has been open for at least one year. Call the number on the back of your credit card to learn your options or request a downgrade.

WYATT SMITH/THE POINTS GUY

Due to Chase’s 5/24 rule, many cardholders prefer to downgrade Chase cards instead of canceling them. But there are other reasons to downgrade a Chase card.

For example, you might try to downgrade the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless® Credit Card (see rates and fees) to the Marriott Bonvoy Bold® Credit Card (see rates and fees) to avoid paying the annual fee.

Related: Transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points before downgrading your card

When can you downgrade a Citi card?

Citi generally requires you to wait at least 12 months after opening an account before downgrading or product changing your card.

10'000 HOURS/GETTY IMAGES
10’000 HOURS/GETTY IMAGES

Unlike many issuers, Citi has historically allowed some product changes outside a card’s original family. However, available downgrade options can vary over time and differ from one account to another. Specifically, some recent reports suggest that cross-family conversions may not be available for Citi / AAdvantage and ThankYou Rewards points-earning cards.

To determine your current options, call the number on the back of your card and ask a Citi representative about eligible product changes.

Related: When (and why) you should downgrade from the Citi Strata Premier to the Citi Strata Card

When can you downgrade a Capital One card?

Capital One doesn’t appear to have a hard-and-fast rule about how long your account must be open before you can downgrade a card. However, it’s generally best to wait at least one year before requesting a product change.

Capital One’s downgrade and upgrade options are often account-specific, so call the number on the back of your card or check your online account to see what offers are available.

capital one bank
WYATT SMITH/THE POINTS GUY

You generally can’t earn a new welcome bonus on most Capital One cards if you’ve earned a bonus on that card within the last 48 months. Capital One sometimes extends this restriction to other cards within the same card family. So, downgrading your card may let you reduce the annual fees you’re paying until you become eligible for a new welcome bonus.

Related: The best time to apply for these popular Capital One credit cards based on offer history

When can you downgrade cards from other issuers?

Other issuers may allow you to downgrade your card, although some smaller issuers may not offer product changes. A good rule of thumb is to wait until your annual fee posts and then call the number on the back of your card to ask about your downgrade options.

Related: 5 types of credit cards you probably shouldn’t have in your wallet

Bottom line

If you’re not getting your money’s worth from one of the rewards cards in your wallet, downgrading to a no-annual-fee card can be an excellent way to keep your card’s credit line open while avoiding the annual fee. When in doubt, call the customer service line on the back of your card to learn about your options.

Related: How to decide if a credit card’s annual fee is worth paying



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What is Azure Traffic Manager?

Azure Traffic Manager distributes traffic to services across the Azure regions. It is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that provides responsiveness and high availability of the services. The Traffic Manager considers the health of all the endpoints and uses DNS to route client requests to a service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method.

A service endpoint might be an application hosted on Azure or an internet-facing application outside of Azure. To suit the needs of different applications, the Azure Traffic Manager offers several endpoint monitoring options and traffic routing methods. It balances the traffic load on services according to set policies. 

Features of Traffic Manager

Here are the features that the Traffic Manager offers.

  • The Traffic Manager continuously monitors endpoints. If, in any case, an endpoint goes down, then it provides automatic failover, which results in increased application availability.
  • The services hosted on Azure run in data centres located around the world. The traffic manager routes traffic to the endpoint with the lowest latency. This improves application responsiveness.
  • If you plan for service maintenance of your applications, then the traffic at the time of service maintenance will be routed to the next best locations, which are alternative endpoints. So, users can perform operations without downtime.
  • The Traffic Manager also supports non-Azure endpoints, which might be on-premise or on hybrid cloud scenarios. These scenarios include burst-to-cloud, migrate-to-cloud, and failover-to-cloud scenarios.
  • It provides various traffic routing methods. We can combine the routing methods to create a nested Traffic Manager profile for more complex deployments.
  • Based on user traffic volumes and patterns, it provides actionable insights. You can get a view of where the users are interacting with the application and the quality of their digital experience.
  • It adheres to the applications of data sovereignty regulations by using geographic fencing.

How does Traffic Manager work?

The key benefits of the Traffic Manager are,

  • The traffic distribution is based on one of the traffic-routing methods provided by Azure.
  • It continuously monitors the health of the endpoints and implements automatic failover.

A client connects to a service using a DNS name. The Traffic Manager will first resolve the DNS name of the service to the IP address. The client is then connected to the IP address of the service to access it. The Traffic Manager works at the DNS level, where it routes traffic to a specific endpoint based on a selected traffic routing method. It is neither a proxy nor a gateway. Clients will directly connect to the selected endpoint. The Traffic Manager will not see the data passing between the client and the service.

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How does a client connect to the Traffic Manager?

When a client wants to connect to a service, a DNS query will be sent to the configured recursive DNS service. A recursive DNS service, which is also known as local DNS, does not host the domains directly. It rather encompasses the process of contacting authoritative DNS services to resolve the DNS name. The recursive DNS finds the name server across the internet for the domain in the DNS query sent by the client.

It then contacts the name server to request the DNS record. It then returns the record that points to the traffic manager of the server. The DNS then sends a request for the traffic manager. Upon receiving the request, the traffic manager chooses an endpoint. The chosen endpoint is sent back as a DNS name record. The recursive DNS service finds the domain name server. The IP address of the service endpoint will be returned. The recursive DSN consolidates and gives a single DNS response. The client then connects to the IP address. 

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Routing methods in Traffic Manager

To route traffic to different endpoints, Azure Traffic Manager supports six types of traffic-routing methods. The routing method specifies which endpoint is returned through DNS.

  • Priority – When you want to send primary service endpoints for all traffic, you can use the priority method. It provides backup if the primary endpoint is unavailable.
  • Weighted – When you want to distribute traffic across endpoints based on some pre-defined weights or evenly, use the weighted method.
  • Performance – When you want the users to interact with the lowest latency endpoint, then you can use the performance method. In this scenario, the endpoints are located in different geographic locations.
  • Geographic – When you want to route users to a specific endpoint based on the geographic location of the user, use the geographic methods. It employs data sovereignty based on different regions.
  • Multivalue – You can use multivalue when you only have IPv4/IPv6 addresses as endpoints. When a query is received, all the healthy endpoints are returned.
  • Subnet – If you want to map a set of user IP addresses to a specific endpoint, use the subnet method. When a request is received, the endpoint mapped to the source IP address will be returned.

Endpoints in Traffic Manager

An endpoint is referred to as application deployment. When the Traffic Manager receives a DNS request, it checks for all the endpoints and chooses an available one, and returns it as a DNS response. Traffic Manager supports the below 3 types of endpoints.

  • Azure endpoints – These are the services hosted in the Azure cloud.
  • External endpoints – These are the services hosted outside of the Azure cloud like on-premise or a different hosting cloud. These are used for IPv4/IPv6 addresses.
  • Nested endpoints – When you want to create more flexible routing schemes, you can use nested endpoints to combine Traffic Manager profiles for complex deployments. A single Traffic Manager profile can have any type of endpoints in it.
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Creating a Traffic Manager for an application

Let us create a Traffic Manager profile that provides high availability for your application. Navigate to https://portal.azure.com/ and log in to your Azure account. You have to deploy your web application in two different Azure regions. So, one will act as a primary endpoint and the other acts as a failover endpoint.

Learn more about AWS vs Azure from this Article Difference between Azure and AWS!

Deploy the web application

Click on the ‘Create a resource’ button on the top-left corner. Click on ‘Web’ and click on ‘Web App’. You will get a Basics tab where you can fill in the web application details. Create a resource group and give a name for it. Give a name for your web application. Select ‘Code’ for the ‘Publish’ field. Give ‘ASP.NET V4.7’ for ‘Runtime stack’, select Windows for ‘Operating System’, select ‘East US’ for the ‘Region’ field. Create a new service plan and give a name for it. Select ‘Standard S1’ for the ‘SKU and size’ field.

Go to the Monitoring tab, select no for the ‘Enable application insight’s option. Click on ‘Review and create’. You will get a review page where you can view all the settings. Click on ‘Create’ to create a website. Follow the same steps to deploy the web application in a different Azure region.

Creating a Traffic Manager profile

Click on ‘Create a resource on the top-left corner. Click on ‘Networking’ and then click on the ‘Traffic Manager profile’. Click on ‘Create Traffic Manager profile’ and a settings page appear. Give a name for the Traffic Manager profile, Select ‘Priority’ for the ‘Routing method’ field, select a subscription method, select your existing resource group, and give the location of the resource group for the ‘Location’ field. Click on ‘Create’ to complete the process.

Add endpoints to Traffic Manager

Give the Traffic Manager profile name in the search bar and select your profile from the results. Click on ‘Settings’ in the Traffic Manager profile. Click on ‘Endpoints’ and then click on ‘Add’. Select ‘Azure endpoint’ for the ‘Type’ field. For the ‘Name’ field, enter the endpoint that you want to set as the primary one. Select ‘App Service’ for ‘Target resource type’, select ‘Choose an app service > East US’ for ‘Target resource’, choose 1 for ‘Priority’ field, and click on ‘OK’. Repeat the same steps for the other endpoint and set the priority as 2.

Testing the Traffic Manager profile

You can find the DNS name of your web application in the overview of your Traffic Manager profile. Enter the DNS name in a browser, and you will get the default website of your web application. Now, disable your primary site in the Traffic Manager profile. Select your primary endpoint in the overview section. Click on ‘Disabled’, and then click on ‘Save’. You can observe the status as disabled when you close the primary endpoint. Check the same DNS name in a different browser, you can see that your web application is still available. You are routed to the failover endpoint.

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Conclusion

Now that you know how to create a Traffic Manager profile, deploy your web application, create multiple endpoints, and try setting up a Traffic Manager profile. It widely improves website response. To reference an Azure Traffic Manager profile, you can also create an alias record name. You can create a Traffic Manager profile through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, and Azure PowerShell. It follows a pay per use pricing plan.

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