Every digital business card tool sucks, so I built my own and open-sourced it

Kevin Wielander — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:14:44 +0000

I needed digital business cards for a small team. Should be simple, right?

I spent way too long looking at existing tools before I snapped and just built my own. Here's why.

The problem

Every tool I tried had at least one of these issues. Most had all of them.

They charge you per card. Per month.

We're talking about a styled HTML page with your name and phone number on it. Some tools charge €2/card/month. For a team of 20, that's almost €500/year. For HTML.

I get that companies need to make money, but this felt insulting.

Your data is trapped

Try exporting your cards from any of these platforms. You'll get a PDF if you're lucky. Your actual design, your team data, your templates locked in. Want to switch tools? Start over.

The "designer" is a form

Every single one advertises a "card designer." You click on it and it's a form. Pick a template, change the font color, type your name. Done. That's not designing, that's filling out a contact form with extra
steps.

No layers. No free positioning. No snapping. You can't even overlap two elements. Want to put your logo at an angle? Tough luck.

Individual OR team. Never both.

Some tools are for making one card for yourself. Others are enterprise team management platforms with 50-seat minimums. Nothing in between for a small team that just wants cards for 5-10 people without an
enterprise sales call.

What I built

I built OwnCardly. It's free, open-source, MIT licensed.

No premium tier. No "community edition" with half the features ripped out. No "contact us for pricing." Just the whole thing, free, do whatever you want with it.

An actual designer

I built a real drag-and-drop canvas. Not a form pretending to be a designer.

Layers panel — reorder, group, lock, hide elements
Snap-to-guide alignment — center, edges, smart guides
Undo/redo with full history
Text, images, shapes, icons, QR codes — all freely positionable
18 Google Fonts with full weight support

It's not Figma, but it's a hell of a lot closer to Figma than anything else in this space.

Works for one person or a whole team

Solo use: Go to the site, pick a template, fill in your info, download your card. 60 seconds, no account needed.

Team use: Create a company, add people (or CSV import your entire team), assign a template, bulk generate cards for everyone. Done.

Your data, your cards

Exported cards are standalone HTML files. No JavaScript calling home, no external dependencies, no CDN. Open the file in a browser and it works. Offline. Forever.

Self-host the whole thing with Docker if you want. Your data stays on your server.

No account needed to try

Guest mode stores everything in localStorage. Play with the designer, create templates, try the whole app. If you decide to sign up later, your data migrates automatically.

Tech stack

For anyone curious:

Next.js with App Router
Supabase for database, auth, and file storage
Tailwind CSS for styling
TypeScript throughout
react-rnd for drag-and-drop on the canvas
Docker for self-hosting

Why open source

I'm not trying to build a startup out of this. I had a problem, I solved it, and it felt wrong to charge for something this basic.

The business model of "rent you your own contact information" never sat right with me. Business cards should be a solved problem, not a SaaS subscription.

MIT license means you can fork it, modify it, self-host it, build a business on top of it — whatever you want. No strings.

Try it

Live app: owncardly.com
Source code: github.com/kevinwielander/digital-business-cards

If you find bugs, open an issue. I actually fix them.

If you think the designer UX could be better, I'd love to hear how. That's where I spent the most time and I know it's still rough in spots.

DEV Community: Kevin Wielander