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As Americans struggle with an affordability crisishigh inflation and an even higher cost of living, especially when it comes to housingBilt is launching three new, low interest credit cards with rates capped at 10% on new purchases for the first yearincluding a premium card offering with a $495 annual fee. The Bilt Card 2.0 series launches next month on February 7. “Between now and January 30, existing cardholders will be able to seamlessly transition and pre-order a new Bilt Card in their Bilt account or online,” according to a statement on the company’s website. There is clearly a need for affordability at this point in time more than ever, Bilt chief executive officer Ankur Jain said in an interview with Bloomberg. It felt like we should be the brand to do this. The move follows President Donald Trump’s call last Friday for a one year, 10% limit on credit card interest rates, saying he supported the Credit Card Competition Act, a bill that if passed by Congress, could provide more oversight on credit card companies. Here’s what to know. What are the advantages of Bilt cards? Bilt cards offer mortgage and rent payments rewards, unlike many credit cards that focus on, say, travel or merchandise points. What this means is Bilt customers earn rewards just for paying their rent and mortgage bills. However, the rewards are not solely limited to that. Customers also earn points on purchases at any one of Bilt’s 45,000 partners, including everything from Walgreens to Lyft to your local gym, according to the New York Times. What are the three new Bilt 2.0 cards? There are three new Bilt Card 2.0 credit cardsincluding a premium card offering with a $495 annual fee, called the Bilt Palladium card. All three cards earn 4% back in Bilt cash on spending, and allow customers to pay their rent and mortgage with no transaction fees. Here’s a breakdown of the three cards below: BILT BLUE CARD A no-annual fee card with flexible rewards $0 annual fee BILT OBSIDIAN CARD Card offers 3X points on dining or groceries, and offers Bilt Travel Hotel credits $95 annual fee BILT PALLADIUM CARD Premium card with high-value rewards and elevated benefits like annual Bilt Cash, Bilt Travel Hotel credits, and Priority Pass $495 annual fee
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E-Commerce
If youre sick of paying for subscription services, Tesla has some bad news for you. The EV maker announced Wednesday that going forward, its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software will only be available as a monthly subscription not a one-time payment. Tesla CEO Elon Musk broke the news on X, the social media platform he owns, noting that the shift will happen on February 14. FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter, Musk wrote, offering no details about how that change would affect the softwares pricing. While the price of access to Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode has fluctuated over time, the current one-time purchase price for the software is $8,000 or $99 paid as a monthly subscription. Tesla once charged as much as $15,000 for the technology, which promises to intelligently and accurately complete driving maneuvers for you, including steering, making lane changes and parking. The feature requires active driver supervision and doesnt make the vehicle autonomous, Tesla disclaims on the Full Self-Driving website. Teslas decision to flip to a subscription model for its self-driving software may not land well with some Tesla buyers, but its not a total surprise. In November, Teslas shareholders approved an eye-watering pay package for Musk that consolidates even more power at the company with the mercurial billionaire with the promise of a payout that could be worth $1 trillion. One of the pay package milestones Musk must hit to unlock the biggest executive payout in history? Boosting Teslas Full Self-Driving software to 10 million monthly active subscriptions before 2035. Much of Teslas future revolves around the future of its self-driving tech, but Musk has broken many promises about the software along the way. In California, the company is facing legal woes over deceptive marketing practices that suggested Teslas technology was autonomous, even as it required close supervision from a human driver at the wheel hence the softwares current nomenclature: Full Self-Driving (Supervised). Musk has also asserted that Teslas vehicles would be appreciating assets thanks to the self-driving software a claim not borne out by Teslas recent tanking used vehicle prices. Teslas competition heats up Depending on where you look, Teslas competition is either out ahead or catching up fast. Earlier this month, Chinese company BYD bumped Tesla from its top slot as the worlds bestselling electric vehicle maker. Tesla reported that it delivered 1.64 million EVs last year, a 9% dip from the year prior. In the last quarter of 2025, Tesla missed sales expectations, tallying 418,227 sales a decline connected to Trumps decision to kill the hefty U.S. tax credits designed to give Americans a break on qualifying EVs. Tesla, like Musk, has a lot of irons in the fire. The company is also investing aggressively into the robotaxi business, even as its self-driving tech faces scrutiny from federal regulators for reckless behavior. Tesla has a lot of catching up to do on that count, with Alphabets Waymo leading the push into autonomous taxi service across major U.S. cities like Austin, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Teslas own robotaxi experiment has yet to impress, based on Fast Companys own firsthand experience. Unlike Waymos own properly self-driving taxis, Teslas robotaxis still come with a human supervisor an awkward compromise and a long way from Musks lofty promises of a fully autonomous near-future.
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E-Commerce
Apple was the last champion of the pay once, own forever crowd, a safe harbor for some of the creatives fleeing Adobes monthly ransom. Now it has introduced Creator Studio, its own subscription-based offering that bundles together tools including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage (as well as newly AI-infused productivity apps like Pages and Numbers). There are already two major creative suits out there: Adobe Creative Cloud and Canva. The former is clearly oriented to the high end, enterprise, and prosumer spaces with heavyweight apps like Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator. The latter focuses on individual, small companies, and enterprises, with a strong productivity and template-based creative suite that has recently been expanded with free professional creative tools. With Creator Studio, however, Apple has put a bunch of tools into a brown paper bag of confusion: The assortment is too complex for the Canva crowd, yet underpowered compared to the Adobe suite. [Image: Apple] Stiff competition Adobe CC is the true bundle for creators. It covers every industry: design, publishing, motion design, video, audio, and even office productivity via Acrobat. For $70 per monthno perpetual, one-time-payment licenses available anymoreyou get all you need, plus Adobe’s AI, Firefly. In fact, for most people is overkill. Not many people do even a third of what Adobe CC covers. This is why so many people are fed up with their subscription model (worth noting: it still has about 41 million paying users). Canva is an all-in-one bundle for everyday creators: a browser-first suite that makes it easy to design social posts, presentations, simple videos, print materials, and brand kits without needing pro expertise. Its built around a cloud account with a big free tier, plus paid plans ($15/month for individuals and $10/month per user for the teams version) that include AI tools. For a while, Canva was “enough” for 90% of what people make, and anything heavierlike advanced photo compositing, full motion graphics pipelines, high-end audiousually lived elsewhere. Now, however, they added free perpetual licenses for the Affinity suite, which competes with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Both of them are coherent in their focus and power in their own way. That’s not really something you can say about Apple’s new $13 monthly subscription package. Apple is asking us to pay for a hodgepodge of apps where the flagship video editor, Final Cut Pro (FCP), may not even be the runner-up anymore. Outside of very high-end video editingstill dominated by AvidAdobe Premiere Pro sits comfortably at the top of the market share charts with an estimated 30 million users in 2024. I say estimated because Adobe hasnt released official numbers. Like Apple, which last claimed Final Cut Pro had 2.5 million users in 2018. A lot has changed since that year and many video editors now argue that Blackmagic Design’s Resolve is the best video editor (and it is free). [Image: Apple] Another main plate in the Creator Studio is the newly acquired Pixelmator Pro, which Apple is seemingly positioning as its Photoshop killer. If you want a potential Adobe killer, you look at Affinity. Now owned by Canva, the Affinity suite (Photo, Designer, Publisher) is a genuine triple-threat that rivals Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a free (again, there are free options to most of the Apple and Adobe apps) price tag. [Image: Apple] Affinity reportedly added 1 million users in a single week. Pixelmator Pro just cant compete with that. Its a lovely app, but pretending it replaces Adobes pro design tools or Affinity is like saying go-kart can replace a Formula 1 car because they all have wheels. (By the way, if you own Pixelmator Pro, you will be forced to subscribe to Creator Studio because Apple says that your license will not receive any updates. A hint of whats to come.) [Image: Apple] The AI card doesnt cut it To compensate, Apple is dangling “exclusive intelligent features” as the primary reason to subscribe, locking automated toolslike Logic Pros new session players and Final Cuts magnetic maskbehind the paywall. Its a weak card to play, especially when you consider how far behind Apple has fallen in the AI races. Are people going to value access to these AI tools enough to justify Creator Studios $13 monthly payment? Time will tell. And what in the world are Pages, Numbers, and Keynote doing here? These productivity apps were already free and were never pro, no matter how many AI features you add to them. Why would a creative person pay for a free word processor that hasnt meaningfully evolved in years? Or a spreadsheet that is a joke compared to Excel? And sure, Keynote is slick, but have you heard about Canva? Or Google Slides for that matter? [Image: Apple] Who is creator studio actually studio for? So who is Creator Studio actually for? The only logical customer I can think of is someone like a YouTuberyour typical solo creator who edits videos, can cook something in Logic Pro, and needs to slap together a thumbnail in Pixelmator. For them, paying $129 a year is a steal compared to Adobes $600. But thats a narrow slice of the $56-billion creator economy Apple claims to target. Musicians using Logic Pro (perhaps the only Creator Studio tool that still has the crown in its respective industry) probably don’t need a video editor. Video editors using Final Cut don’t need a spreadsheet app. And so on. Judging by this thread on Reddit or this one in an Apple user forum, people seem to agree that this is a bad movepeople are tired of subscriptions. Even fan publications like Apple Insider have slammed the move. Apple users fear that eventually the company will kill the one-time-only licenses and force everyone into the subscription model. While Apple hasnt replied yet to questions about the potential future end of licenses yet (we will update the article when/if they do) its the shareholder-friendly thing to do.
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E-Commerce
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