A business card app you buy once, not rent
Card scanning became a subscription category for reasons that have nothing to do with what scanning a card costs. Here are the numbers.
Last updated 2026-08-17
The five-year cost of a filing cabinet
A business card app does one thing: it turns paper into a contact record and keeps it somewhere you can search. That is a filing cabinet. Filing cabinets are not a service, and the industry priced them like one anyway.
| App | Model | Price | 5-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kardhaus | One-time | $5.99 | $5.99 |
| HiHello | Subscription | $6.00 / mo billed annually | ≈ $360 |
| Blinq / Popl | Subscription | $7.33–11.99 / mo | $440–719 |
| Covve | Subscription | $119 / seat / yr | ≈ $595 |
| ABBYY BCR | Sub or lifetime | $29.99 / yr or $59.99 once | $150 or $59.99 |
| CamCard (TW) | Subscription | NT$1,490 / yr | ≈ NT$7,450 |
| Eight (JP) | Subscription | ¥600 / mo | ≈ ¥36,000 |
Prices are the publicly listed consumer rates at the time of writing and will drift. The point is not the exact figure — it is the shape of the curve. One of these lines stops.
What the subscription is actually paying for
Mostly, servers you did not ask for. If a card scanner uploads your photo to process it, someone has to pay for that upload, that processing, that storage, and the account system that ties it to you. The subscription is real — it funds infrastructure that exists because of an architectural choice.
But your iPhone has done offline text recognition since 2019. Apple ships the OCR in the operating system, and it handles Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Latin scripts on device, for free, with no network. Once the recognition is local, the recurring cost is close to zero — and so is the justification for a recurring price.
Where we are honest about a cost
Hard cards — stylised 楷體, vertical layouts, low-contrast foil — sometimes beat plain OCR. Kardhaus answers that with a second on-device pass through Apple’s language model, which also runs on your phone and costs us nothing per card. There is no per-scan bill arriving at our end, so there is nothing for a subscription to cover. A company charging you monthly for recognition is charging you for a server it chose to need.
The promise, stated so you can hold us to it
- One purchase, forever. Whatever you paid, you own. New features are never a new charge.
- No subscription tier will be added later. Not a Pro plan, not a Teams plan bolted onto your data.
- No ads, on any tier, ever. Including the free tier.
- No account. There is nothing to log into, so there is nothing to lock you out of.
- The price goes up, not down, and we say so first. Founding price $5.99 → $7.99 → $9.99 in stages.
That last one is the part most companies leave out. We would rather tell you the price is rising than pretend a discount is expiring. If you buy at $5.99 and the price is $9.99 next year, you paid $5.99 forever — that is the whole deal.
What you get for free, before you pay anything
The free tier is not a crippled demo. Unlimited cards stored, unlimited manual entry, unlimited import from any app you are leaving, full search, tags, iCloud sync across your own devices, and 100 AI scans to start — with double-sided cards counted as one card, not two.
Paying unlocks bulk export, batch scanning, and unlimited cloud recognition. On-device recognition is never limited, on any tier, because charging per scan for something your own phone computes would be absurd.
Common questions
How can a one-time purchase be sustainable?
What happens if you stop developing the app?
Is there a family or multi-device price?
Will you raise the price on people who already bought?
Not on the App Store yet
Get the first build, and 100 free scans
100 free scans, front and back included
Kardhaus is in development for iOS 18 and later. Leave your email and you get the TestFlight build when it opens, plus 100 free AI scans on the house — double-sided cards included, counted as one card, not two.