Professional contact card without the company overhead

Why the subscription is the part that matters here

Freelance income is lumpy. Three good months, then a quiet one, and the quiet one is when you go through the standing orders and cancel whatever is not earning. That is not disorganisation — it is the correct thing to do when the money is uneven.

Which is exactly why a contact card on a subscription is the wrong shape for this trade. The month you cancel it is the month your card stops working. And it stops working silently: the people holding it get a dead page and you never hear about it, because the whole point of a card is that you gave it away and forgot. You find out months later, if ever.

Ours cannot do that to you. The profile, the QR, the tap counting and the form that lets somebody send their details back are free and stay free, and the card is paid once. There is nothing to lapse. Why there is no subscription sets out what we do charge for and why.

You are not a company, and the card should not pretend otherwise

A printed card forces you to decide what you are on the day you order five hundred of them. Sole traders usually end up with something vague — a name, a phone number and a job title that does not quite describe the work — because anything more specific will be wrong within a year.

A profile can be specific because it can change. Put what you actually do this year, the rates or day rate if you want people to self-qualify before they ring, a link to recent work, and the two contact routes you actually answer. When the work shifts, edit it. Nobody needs reprinting and nothing in anyone's wallet goes stale.

If you do two distinct things — the design work and the photography, the consulting and the teaching — you can run them as separate profiles under one account, each with its own details and its own card, and hand over whichever fits the room.

The follow-up problem, which is the actual problem

Most freelancers do not lose work because somebody lost their card. They lose it because a conversation at an event never turned into an email, and a fortnight later neither side can remember enough to restart it.

The card fixes the half you control. They tap it or scan the QR, your details are on their phone, and they can send their own name and email straight back from the same page without an app or an account. That gives you a name to follow up rather than a memory of somebody in a blue jacket. How contact-back works, and what the tap counting shows you.

What it costs

£24 plastic, £35 bamboo, £59 metal — paid once, posted free in the UK. The profile behind it is free whether you buy a card or not, so you can set one up tonight, share it by QR at the next thing you go to, and decide about a card afterwards. Full pricing, or how the cards work.