You are a week out from a conference or creator event, and someone has told you to get a digital business card. Before you pay for a subscription, it helps to know what it replaces and what it adds. This piece prices the middle option, a paid tap or QR card app, against the two options on either side of it: a printed card, and a QR code on your phone that points at a page you already own.
What the choice looks like at the door
There are three things a person can hand over at an event. A printed card needs no battery and no signal; its costs are covered in why the price per printed card jumps for a small run. A QR code on a phone costs nothing extra if you already have a page to point it at. A card app sits between them: a hosted card, usually shared by QR code, link, wallet pass or an NFC tap, with a subscription attached.
Every figure below was read from the vendor’s own plan page on 16 October 2026. No third party article was used for any price or feature. The three products covered are Blinq, HiHello and Popl. Other card apps exist and are not covered.
A note on who is writing: followedapp is published by the team behind RecurPost. RecurPost is not a digital business card product and is not part of this comparison.
The zero cost baseline: a QR code to a page you already own
The method has no vendor in it. You need a page that carries what you want a stranger to have, such as a phone number, an email address or a short links page. You generate a QR code that encodes that page’s address, and you save the image to your phone so you can pull it up in two taps. The other person points their camera at it and the page opens in their browser.
What this does not give you is worth listing, because these are the things a subscription is being bought to replace. There is no record of who scanned. There is no form capture on the other person’s side unless your page has one. And there is no team control: if three people from your company attend, each needs their own code and page, and nobody can lock a template.
One caution if you route the code through a tracking service to get scan counts: some of those services meter scans. That is covered in what happens when a tracked QR code reaches its scan cap.
What three vendors publish, side by side
The table lists each plan as the vendor’s page states it. Where a cell says “not published”, the page does not give the figure.
| Plan | Price as published | Billing basis | Cards or scans allowed | Lead capture |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blinq Free | $0 | Free forever | Two cards | Not listed in the plan summary |
| Blinq Premium | $9.99 monthly, or $7.33 per month billed annually | Individual, one person | Up to five cards | Universal contact scanner and AI contact enrichment listed |
| Blinq Business | $6.99 monthly, or $4.99 per month billed annually | Per user | Cards for the whole team | “Lead capture & enrichment” listed, plus a per lead charge (see below) |
| HiHello Personal | Free | 1 user | 4 cards, 5 card and badge scans a month | Scan cap only |
| HiHello Professional | $6 per month, $72 billed yearly | 1 user | 16 cards, 20 card and badge scans a month, unlimited scans add-on available | Contact enrichment listed |
| HiHello Business | $5 per user per month, $60 per user per year | 5 to 100 users | Unlimited cards, unlimited scans | Event lead capture listed |
| Popl | Not published | Quote by meeting | Not published | Not published |
Popl needs its own note. Its pricing page says: “we quote pricing over a meeting instead of publishing it on our website.” Its digital business card page says Popl “offers a free plan for individuals” and also mentions Popl Pro and Popl Pro+ plans for individuals, without a price on the page. Because no team figure is public, no per user comparison with Popl is possible from public pages.
For a team of five, the two vendors that publish a per user rate work out as follows. These totals are computed from the published rates, not quoted by either vendor. HiHello Business: $60 x 5 = $300 a year. Blinq Business billed annually: $4.99 x 12 x 5 = $299.40 a year. Neither total includes any usage charge, and Blinq lists one.
What the subscription adds: lead capture, analytics, team control
- Lead capture. HiHello caps card and badge scans at 5 a month on Personal and 20 on Professional, with unlimited scans on Business or through an add-on on Professional. For a two day event, a cap of 5 means the fifth conversation on the first morning uses up the month, and the pricing page does not say here what happens after that. Blinq’s Business section lists “$9.99 per lead captured and enriched” and adds “Credit consumption is billed monthly.” The page links to a separate Lead Capture pricing explanation, which was not followed for this piece. A free QR route can approximate this with a form on your page and a spreadsheet of the responses, but it will not scan someone else’s badge.
- Analytics. HiHello’s summary lists “Card analytics” first under Professional, and its comparison table labels the row “Card analytics (Views, saves, leads)”. Business adds team analytics. On Blinq, the Business summary lists “Individual & team analytics” and the comparison table has “Card Analytics” and “Attribution, ROI, campaigns” rows, but the text of the page does not show which tier each row applies to, so no tier is named for Blinq.
- Team management. Blinq’s Business summary lists custom card templates and brand control, automated card provisioning and a corporate contact book. HiHello’s Business plan lists card templates for sub-teams and SSO and directory sync. This matters only if more than one person carries the card. A solo attendee has no use for it, and a shared spreadsheet is the nearest free substitute for a contact book.
Hardware is a separate line
An NFC tap card is a physical object, and its price is not on the plan pages checked. Blinq’s hardware shop, at shop.blinq.me, returned placeholder template content on 16 October 2026, including copy about audio equipment, so no hardware price is stated here. No NFC card price was fetched from any vendor’s shop page, so none appears in this piece.
HiHello’s comparison table does list a row reading “Program your own NFC card (Tap to share)”. That means the page offers a way to program an NFC card you supply. Which tags work is not something this piece can say, and the row’s tier availability is not readable from the page text.
A tap needs the other person’s phone to read NFC, and a QR code needs only a camera. Test both on a colleague’s phone before you travel; no vendor page was used for this point.
A decision rule for the week before the event
Answer three questions, then read off the table.
- Will anyone else carry the card? If the answer is no, the team plans are out of scope. If yes, the per user rates apply: $60 per user per year at HiHello Business from five users, or $4.99 per user per month billed annually at Blinq Business. Popl needs a conversation.
- Do you need a record of who you met? If you do not, a QR code to your own page covers it. If you do, the question becomes whether a form (see response-metered form tools for its caps) is enough, or whether you want the paid scanner and enrichment.
- How many people will you meet? Count your own number. Set it against HiHello’s 5 and 20 scans a month, or against Blinq’s per lead charge multiplied by that count.
The case where a paid plan is plainly unnecessary: one person, no need for scan records, and a page that is already live. The case where it is not: a team that wants leads synced to a CRM. Blinq lists “Native integration with 20+ CRMs” on its page, and HiHello’s FAQ says Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrations are included in Business and Enterprise. A free QR code cannot do that without manual work.
Method and what this is not
Prices verified 16 October 2026 from each vendor’s own plan page, with URLs listed under Sources. This blog post is not Watchdog data and is not on the re-verification schedule, so figures may have changed since that date.
FAQ
Does the person I meet need an app to receive a digital business card?
Popl’s digital business card page, read on 16 October 2026, says “No app needed!” and that its card “opens in the recipient’s browser.” That statement is Popl’s about its own cards, and this piece did not check other vendors on the point.
What does lead capture cost on these apps?
Blinq lists $9.99 per lead captured and enriched, billed monthly as credit consumption. HiHello caps scans at 5 on Personal and 20 on Professional, with unlimited on Business or through an add-on whose price was not found on the pricing page. Popl publishes no figure and quotes by meeting.
Sources
- Blinq pricing, fetched 16 October 2026, HTTP 200
- HiHello pricing, fetched 16 October 2026, HTTP 200
- Popl pricing, fetched 16 October 2026, HTTP 200
- Popl digital business card, fetched 16 October 2026, HTTP 200