I have been managing my credit card balances very tightly the past few months. I switched "the one" I was using for AZEO this month, so I had a period of 1 week where all my cards were reporting $0 before the new $2-8.9% balance showed up on my other card. In case anyone is working on the maths of FICO 8 the drop from $3 balance to $0 lowered my FICO 8 by 16 points. When the new card reported it's $150 (5%) balance it shot back up exactly 16 points.
AZEO is definitely much stronger than all zeroes. If you are not maintaing AZEO all the time I would highly recommend running it for a couple months leading up to any big purchase if the extra points could get you a better interest rate.
