The old way
A paper card
Printed in a batch of 500, of which you will hand out perhaps 200 before your title changes and the rest go in a drawer. Then you order another 500.
Five steps, every time. See below.
Impact
A handshake shouldn't cost a tree.
Around ten billion paper business cards are printed each year, and the large majority are thrown away within a week of being handed over. Replacing one with a link is a small thing. Ten billion small things is not.
The new way
One link
Made once, updated whenever you like, handed over as many times as you want. Your title changes and every copy already in the world changes with it.
One step: share.
Lifecycle
What actually happens to a paper card.
Every printed card makes the same journey. Cardly does not make it shorter — it removes it.
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Harvest
Trees felled for virgin pulp, or bleached recycled stock.
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Print
Offset presses, solvent inks, foil and die-cuts. All of it energy-hungry.
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Ship
Boxes moved by road and air to offices and homes.
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Exchange
Handed over, pocketed, forgotten. Most never reach a CRM.
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Landfill
Coated, laminated or foil-stamped, and usually not recyclable.
Method
Every input on this page is on this page.
We do not publish a running total of trees saved, because we cannot measure one. What we can show is the arithmetic, with the assumptions visible, so you can substitute your own and get an answer you trust more than ours.
Two hundred cards a professional a year is a common industry rule of thumb, not a figure we measured. Ten cards to a sheet and roughly 8,300 sheets to a tree are standard printing and pulp conversions. If your numbers differ, the shape of the answer does not.
Working from different figures, or want the sources? Write to info@amygdal.com.
Per 1,000 people, per year
- Paper cards printed per person
- 200
- Cards not printed
- 200,000
- Sheets of card stock saved
- ~20,000
- Trees not felled
- ~2.4
200,000 ÷ 10 cards a sheet = 20,000 sheets. 20,000 ÷ 8,333 sheets a tree ≈ 2.4.
Commitments
Things you can check by using it.
No certification logos and no offset partners, because we have neither. These are decisions about how the product is built, and every one of them is visible from inside the app.
Nothing is shipped
There is no Cardly merchandise, no starter pack, no NFC card in a padded envelope. A card is a link, and links do not travel by van.
Your contacts live on your device
Cards and contacts are stored on the phone and synced, not warehoused for analysis. Less data held is less data to power.
The free tier is not a trial
One card, free, indefinitely, with the core features in it. A paper card costs money to print; the replacement should not cost money to hold.
It works offline
A shared QR stays valid without a signal. Nobody has to be online for the exchange to work, and nothing is re-fetched to make it happen.
No ad SDKs, no data brokers
Cardly does not sell contact data and does not embed advertising trackers. Read the privacy policy — it is written in plain sentences.
Your data comes out again
Export what you have put in, and delete the account outright when you want to. Both are in the app, not behind an email request.
Stop reprinting. Start sharing.
Free for one card, and that card never needs a print run.