A business card scanner you buy once

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.

Published prices, five-year total for one person. Verified 17 Aug 2026.

App	Model	Price	5-year total (USD)
Kardhaus	One-time	US$5.99	US$5.99
Digital-card platform	Subscription	$6.00 / mo billed annually	$360
NFC card platform	Subscription	$7.33–11.99 / mo	$440–$719
Contact-CRM, per seat	Subscription	$119 / seat / yr	$595
Scanner with a lifetime tier	Sub or lifetime	$29.99 / yr or $59.99 once	$150 or $59.99
Cloud scanner, Taiwan pricing	Subscription	NT$1,490 / yr	≈ $234
Cloud scanner, Japan pricing	Subscription	¥600 / mo	≈ $226

Totals in other currencies converted at the 2026-08-18 rate (US$1 = NT$31.84 = ¥159.31). Figures marked ≈ are our conversion, not a published price. 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.

Cumulative cost of one person’s card app over five years.

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 pass, AI recognition, built on Apple Intelligence rather than on a server of ours. We run no recognition servers, so there is no infrastructure of ours 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. Pro stays a one-time purchase — no Pro subscription, and no 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 US$5.99 → US$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 US$5.99 and the price is US$9.99 next year, you paid US$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, search across every field, tags, iCloud sync across your own devices — and the card map, the meeting timeline, Rapport and My Card, which are free for everyone and not part of Pro. You also get 50 AI credits to start, shared between AI recognition and AI-written follow-up drafts, with a double-sided card counted as one card, not two.

Pro unlocks three things, and only three: unlimited AI recognition, Find someone from a sentence (search in plain words), and unlimited AI-written follow-up drafts — drafts from templates stay free. All three need Apple Intelligence: an iPhone or iPad that supports it, in a region where Apple offers it, with it switched on. On a device without it, Pro unlocks nothing that can run there, so check yours before you buy. Scanning and export stay free — charging by the card for work your own phone is doing would be a strange way to price a filing cabinet.

Common questions

How can a one-time purchase be sustainable?

Because the app never sends your cards to us, there is no card infrastructure of ours to keep running. Scanning happens on your phone, and the smarter recognition pass is Apple Intelligence, not infrastructure we operate. A card app is a filing cabinet, and a filing cabinet has no monthly cost — what a subscription in this category pays for is infrastructure this app does not need. What we do have to cover is development, and more people buying once covers that better than fewer people renting.

What happens if you stop developing the app?

It keeps working. Your data is in your own iCloud and on your own device in a standard format, and it all exports to vCard and CSV, or straight into iOS Contacts. Nothing depends on a server of ours staying up — which is exactly the failure mode that makes cloud card apps risky to depend on.

Is there a family or multi-device price?

iCloud sync across your own iPhone and iPad is included in one purchase. So is Family Sharing: the purchase is Family Shareable, so one payment covers up to six people in your family group, on their own devices, with their own separate cards.

Will you raise the price on people who already bought?

Not possible, and not intended. A one-time purchase on the App Store cannot be re-charged. When the price goes from US$5.99 to US$9.99, existing buyers are unaffected and get every future version at no cost.

iPhone · iOS 26 and later

Download on the App Store

Free to download · Pro is US$5.99 once · no subscription

Download on the App Store