How much does an NFC business card really cost?

Ask what an NFC business card costs and you get answers ranging from two euros to six thousand. Both are true, because they price different things.

The hardware is the cheap part

A blank NTAG213 tag holds 144 bytes of user memory, which is several times what a web address needs. Bought individually it costs one to two euros; in a pack of ten it is closer to fifty cents each. A printed card with the chip embedded runs higher because you are paying for the printing, the material and the run length, not for the electronics.

Nothing about that hardware is proprietary. Any tag advertised as NFC Forum Type 2 behaves the same, whoever sold it, because all it does is store a URL. A card locked to one vendor is locked by that vendor's software, never by the plastic.

The service is where the money is

What you actually buy is what happens after the tap: the page that opens, the form that records a contact, the register that keeps it, and the emails that go out afterwards. Vendors price that very differently.

Tool	Entry cost	Model
LeadShake	Free, then 19 EUR per event	One-off payment
Blinq	From 4.99 $ per card per month	Per-card subscription
HiHello	From 5 $ per user per month	Per-user subscription
WEMET	Card from 50 EUR, then 30 EUR a year	Annual licence per card
momencio	Around 6,000 $ a year, 5 seats minimum	Annual contract
Popl	On request, after a demo	Per-seat quote

Figures read on the vendors' own pricing pages on 2026-07-15. Compare them yourself before buying: pricing pages change, and a comparison nobody re-checks is a comparison that expires.

What a subscription costs over three years

A five dollar monthly card is sixty dollars a year and a hundred and eighty over three, for a piece of plastic whose chip cost fifty cents. That arithmetic is not an argument against subscriptions in general, it is an argument for knowing what the recurring part buys.

It buys something real when your card changes often, when a team needs shared administration, or when the tool does the lead work for you. It buys very little when you tap a card twice a month and the rest of the year it sits in a wallet.

The three questions worth asking before you pay

Can you bring your own tag? If the answer is no, the price of the card is the price of entry and you will pay it again for every replacement.

What happens to your contacts if you stop paying? This is the question vendors answer least clearly. A register you can export at any time in a standard format is a register you own. One that becomes read-only, then unreachable, was never yours.

Is capture included or extra? Handing your details out is the easy half. Recording the other person's details, with their consent, is the half that turns a fair into a pipeline, and several tools price it as an upgrade.

LeadShake answers those three in the same way each time: any tag works, your export is one click and always available, and capture is unlimited on the free plan. The nineteen euros buy a second card running in parallel for thirty days, which is what an event needs and what everyday use does not. The full breakdown sits on the pricing page.

The number that actually compares: cost per contact

Price per card compares badly, because a card is not what you are buying. Cost per contact compares well, and it is arithmetic you can do with your own last event.

Take the contacts you captured at your last fair, and divide the cost of the tool by that number. An Event Pass at nineteen euros across forty contacts is forty-eight cents each. The same forty contacts through a rented reader billed per device per day, across three days and two devices, sits in a different order of magnitude entirely.

The comparison flips for a stand that sweeps six hundred badges, which is exactly the point: the right tool depends on whether you count rows or conversations, and the per-contact figure is what makes that visible instead of arguable.

The cost nobody quotes: changing jobs

A printed card carries a name, a title and a company. Any of the three changing turns the whole run into waste, and it is the run length that made the unit price look good in the first place.

A rewritable tag pointing at a page you control has no such failure. The title changes on the page, the tag never moves, and nothing is reprinted. That is worth more over five years than any difference in the price of the plastic, and it is the one saving no vendor puts on a pricing page.