Building NoBrandCards in public, and starting over

We decided early on to build NoBrandCards in the open: share what we ship, what we cut, and why. This post started as a monthly update in May 2026. Since then we've rebuilt the product from scratch, so here's the honest version of where things stand.

What the first version taught us

The first NoBrandCards grew fast. In one month it gained themes, templates, scheduling embeds, payment links, an email signature generator, analytics, team brand kits, enterprise single sign-on, a public directory, a referral program and more.

Plenty of that worked. But a product that does everything for everyone gets slow, hard to keep reliable, and hard to explain. And the one thing that set us apart, a card with no branding on it, got buried under features most people never used.

Why we started over

In November 2026 we rebuilt NoBrandCards around a few promises, and cut anything that didn't serve them:

• No branding, anywhere a visitor looks, on any plan. Not on the page, the saved contact, the QR code, or the email someone gets after sharing their details.
• Fast on any phone. A tap opens on a phone that has never seen the site, so card pages are drawn on our server as finished HTML, with one small stylesheet and a tiny script. No app to download.
• Private by default. No cookies for visitors, no third-party scripts, and IP addresses never stored with stats.
• Your data is yours. Contacts export as CSV or vCard on every plan, and you can download everything in your account.
• Hardware that never stops working. A card linked to your page keeps opening it on the free plan.

The accounts and cards people already had came across to the new version, and every printed QR code and programmed card keeps opening the same address.

What the new version does

• Cards built from blocks in any order: contact details, social icons, buttons and links (bookings, payments, reviews), text, video, photo galleries, PDFs and an inline form. Twelve themes, ten font pairings, your own accent color.
• Save contact in one tap, and two-way exchange: visitors share their details back, get your contact by email from your name, and land in your contact book.
• Sharing tools: styled QR codes, email signatures for Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail, a virtual background, a one-line website embed, and Direct mode, where a tap opens a single link.
• A contact book with notes, tags, reminders and exports, and stats on views, saves, link clicks and where people came from.
• On Pro: more cards, full stats history, instant push alerts, custom questions, Quick Capture, your own follow-up email, event tags, a contacts map, and an API with webhooks.

What we deliberately left out

• Native iPhone and Android apps. The web app installs on your home screen and does the job; we'd rather spend the time on speed and reliability.
• Enterprise extras like single sign-on and user provisioning. They'll come back only if teams ask for them.
• A public directory and referral program. Neither fits a product whose point is that the card is about you, not us.

What's next

Coming soon: the Teams plan (members, roles, templates with locked fields, shared contacts and a team directory), custom domains on Pro, a paper business card scanner, and an online shop for cards and tags.

We'll write about each one here as it ships. If you want to try what's live now, make a free card, or tell us what's missing. We read everything.