Want discounts on stuff you buy for your small company with a credit card? No problem. Want to earn airline miles for every dollar you charge? Plenty of cards let you do that. Want a cheap interest rate? Well, now, there's a new idea.

The last time business week looked at small-business credit cards, in 1997, an annual rate below 16% was extraordinary. But this year, competition has pushed rates into single digits, and the range of product discounts and freebies is so vast that some entrepreneurs are building them into their business plans.

Just ask Robert B. McKinley, president of CardWeb.com Inc. in Frederick, Md. Last year, he used an American Express Corporate Platinum card to charge everything from temp workers to online domain names. That helped him rack up so many points with airlines, hotels, and other services that he arranged a free one-week trip to Paris for two with seats in business class and stays at four- and five-star hotels. Later, he went to London for $900, using 20,000 points to sit in business class, an upgrade that would have cost him $5,300. (The trip entitled him to 15,000 new points since he charged the fare on his card.) Still not tapped out, he created an employee benefit by shipping lobster-and-clam dinners to each of his 14 employees as a Christmas gift, and he sent about half a dozen more to clients. "It's kind of a currency unto itself," McKinley says. If he seems unusually adept at this, it's no surprise: CardWeb is one of the leading independent monitors of credit-card offerings.

Continued