You searched “how much does a digital business card cost” and found everything: free, €4.99/month, €70 per card, “contact us”. This guide explains what you’re actually buying in each model — including the costs that never appear in the pricing table.
The category’s three pricing models
1. The “free” one. Free digital card apps exist, and they get paid another way: your contacts become inventory, your page carries their brand, and the data of whoever taps you feeds the product they sell to third parties. If you’re not paying for the product, the product is your networking. For casual personal use it may do; for a company it’s a brand and GDPR risk.
2. The one-off card (€30–70, single payment). You buy the plastic, point it at a profile. It serves the freelancer — but look at what it doesn’t include: central management, revocation when someone leaves, statistics, brand control. Ten one-off cards are not a team programme; they’re ten individual problems.
3. The managed-card subscription. The model of the serious platforms (ours included): you pay for the lifecycle — issue, update, revoke, forward — not for the piece of plastic. It’s the only model where the card of someone who left stops speaking for the company in one click.
The hidden costs nobody prints in the table
- Reprints. On paper, every title or phone change costs a print run. On a card that is a link, it costs zero — the page updates and the plastic stays correct.
- Lock-in. Can you export your contacts and leave? If the answer is “sort of”, the real price is higher than it looks.
- Data risk. A platform that stores IPs and profiles the people who tap is a liability waiting for a client’s due diligence. Cheap can turn very expensive at the first audit — we explained why in the GDPR guide for digital cards.
- Your team’s time. Without central management, every onboarding and offboarding is manual work in disguise.
How to compare proposals in three questions
1. What happens to the card when the person leaves? 2. Who owns the data — and the data of the people who tap? 3. Does the price cover the lifecycle or just the plastic?
Any serious vendor answers all three without hedging. Our answers live in privacy and for teams — and the concrete numbers for your team size are one email away. No funnel, no unsolicited sales call.