Built for real work
Trades, mobile services, sole traders, marina teams. People who get phoned, not networked.
About
Contact identity for people who actually get phoned
UniversalContacts is the live contact identity layer for UK small businesses — trades, mobile services, sole traders and site teams. Part of the Towpath estate, built and run in the UK.
Why we built it
The profile is the product
A plain printed card is a snapshot of the day it went to the printers. Change a number, a role or an address and every one you have ever handed out is quietly wrong, and there is nothing you can do about it except throw the rest away. Apps solve that by asking a stranger to download something, which is not a solution, it is a different problem.
So we built one live contact profile you update once, handed over however suits you: a free QR, or a printed card in plastic, bamboo or brushed-steel metal. The card is just delivery. The profile is the product.
UniversalContacts sits inside the Towpath estate alongside GotAPal, 3 Wee Pages, ServicePay and PayCamp. Small tools, one identity layer, no subscription traps.
UniversalContacts
GotAPal
3 Wee Pages
ServicePay
PayCampWhat we believe
Four things we won't compromise on
Lifetime by default
No forced subscription, no expiring profile. Buy a card once, keep the live profile forever.
Privacy you control
A separate card for each profile, so you share only what you want. No-one sees everything by default.
UK-built
Designed and run in the UK by Towpath Digital Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. Your profile's data is held in London.
Who you are actually buying from
Towpath Digital Ltd, a UK company incorporated in December 2025, registered in England and Wales as company number 16913912. The registered office is a boatyard in Godmanchester, which is where the desk is rather than a convenient address, and the company is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under ZC210106.
It is a small core team, with specialists brought in for the work that needs them — artwork, print, marketing. That is worth saying plainly rather than dressing it up, because it is the thing that decides what it is like to deal with us. You will not be handed to an account manager, there is no upgrade conversation waiting at the end of a trial, and the person who answers an email about a card is one of the people who built the thing.
Who it is for, and who it is not for
Almost every digital business card is built for a conference badge: sales teams, events, a week of networking. That is a real job and there are products that do it well.
This one is for the other week. The electrician who gets rung at half seven, the marina office fielding berth calls all summer, the mobile hairdresser whose whole diary is rebookings, the sole trader quoting on a driveway. People who get phoned rather than networked, and who hand their number to somebody standing in front of them and then hope it survives until March.
That is why the two things almost everybody else charges for - knowing that somebody used your card, and letting them send their details back - are free here and always will be. They are not a premium feature of the job. They are the job.
What we will not do
We will not make the profile stop working. Buy a card or do not buy a card; the profile, the QR, the lead capture and the analytics are free and stay free. Not for ninety days, not until we change our minds. There is no clock running anywhere on your account, and there is nothing to cancel if you walk away.
We will not hold your data hostage. Everything you hold downloads as one file from your dashboard, at any time, on the free plan. Getting your data out is not the paid feature. The paid feature is getting it out in somebody else’s format, which is a convenience rather than a ransom. The same principle runs through the rest of what we make: on our small-website product, the customer is the legal owner of their own domain and can take it with them.
We will not tell you a number is proven when it is not. There are thirteen artefact sizes in this product whose QR codes have not yet been printed and scan-tested, and the build prints that list every time anybody deploys. It would be easy to stop printing it. It is more useful to be the sort of company that knows.
The rest of what we make
UniversalContacts is one of several small tools that share the same idea. A business ought to own its own contacts, its own domain and its own data. And software should be bought once, or paid for fairly, rather than rented until you stop noticing.
The others are a shared contact book for teams, booking and payment software for holiday parks and marinas, a directory for finding trades, and a small website product for businesses that need one page that works. The first holiday park went live on the booking product in May. Different jobs, the same core team, the same rule about who owns what.
Where to find a person
Email is the fastest way to reach us, and it reaches a person rather than a queue. If you want to know how we handle data before you sign up for anything, the trust page says what is stored, where, and for how long. And the privacy policy names the records the law makes us keep, rather than saying “as required” and leaving it there.
And if you are looking for something specific and cannot find it, every page on this site is listed in one place.
Built on the water, which is both a tagline and a description of where the office is: the team still write the code on the boat the product was built on.
