What happens when you cancel a digital business card?
The card is the easy part. The hard part is the five hundred printed cards already in other people's wallets, pointing at a URL you do not control — and the contact list you may not be able to export once the plan has lapsed.
The short answer
When a digital business card subscription lapses, one of three things usually happens, and the vendor decides which: the card keeps working but loses paid features, the account drops to a restricted free tier with lower card and contact limits, or the profile stops resolving. Policies differ by vendor and change without notice, so check the terms of the specific platform you are on rather than trusting a general answer — including this one.
The consequence people miss is the printed one. A QR code is just a printed URL: it keeps encoding the same address forever. If that address sits on the vendor's domain, only the vendor can decide whether it still resolves, and you cannot redirect it. If it sits on a domain you own, you can repoint it in an afternoon. That single distinction decides how much of your investment survives a cancellation.
The four things that break when a card platform lapses
Ranked by how expensive each one is to undo. The first is an inconvenience; the last is a reprint.
Paid features switch off
Custom colours, premium templates, branding removal, lead-capture forms and analytics history are the usual first casualties. This is the mild failure mode — the card is still there, it just looks and behaves like a free card again.
Limits apply retroactively to what you can do next
Free tiers cap cards and stored contacts. Some platforms keep existing data and simply stop you adding more; others restrict access to records over the cap. It is worth knowing which before you cancel, because the difference is whether your contact list is intact or merely visible.
Your export tool disappears with your plan
This is the trap. Contact export is a paid feature on many platforms — ours included — so the moment the plan lapses you may lose the one tool you needed to leave cleanly. Export first, cancel second. There is no order in which that advice is wrong.
Printed QR codes and NFC tags point at a URL you do not own
Cards, badges, table tents, NFC discs on the back of a phone. All encode one address. If that address is on the vendor's domain and stops resolving, every physical artefact you have distributed is dead and there is no redirect you can set. This is the failure mode that costs actual money.
Where your card URL lives decides what you can rescue
We have not verified any vendor's cancellation policy and we are not going to guess at one. What we can show is the fact underneath it: whose domain your card is served from. That is what determines whether a printed QR code can be rescued at all, whatever the policy turns out to say.
| Where cards are served from | A domain you own | Minimum seats to get it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Popl | Sub-domain only (subdomain.poplme.co), Pro+ and Teams (unverified figure) | No | Not offered |
| HiHello | Branded sub-domain only; cards are hosted on HiHello servers | No | Not offered |
| Blinq | Not documented on any plan | No | Not offered |
| Mobilo | Yes — genuine custom domain, Enterprise tier | Yes | 100 seats |
| Dot Card | Not documented on any tier (unverified figure) | No | Not offered |
| NexaLink | nexalink.co on every plan; your own domain on Business and Agency | Business and Agency only | None — one person can buy Business |
* Figures for Popl and Dot Card are third-party and unconfirmed — popl.co no longer publishes pricing. Sub-domains such as you.vendor.co are branded, not owned: the vendor still controls the DNS, so the distinction matters precisely at cancellation. Checked 2026-08-09. Solo and Team do not include a custom domain — see the honest version below.
Read the table for what it is: of the five platforms in our dataset, only Mobilo documents a genuine customer-owned domain, and reaching it means a 100-seat plan. Everyone else's cards — and every NexaLink Solo and Team card — live on someone else's domain. That is not an accusation about anyone's cancellation policy. It is simply the reason a cancellation policy has teeth.
What happens to your NexaLink account — the honest version
A page about everyone else's downgrade pain that skips its own is marketing, not information. So here is exactly what our free plan keeps and what it does not, taken from the same config the product enforces.
| NexaLink free plan | Any paid NexaLink plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Your card URL keeps resolving | Yes | Yes |
| Cards you already published stay published | Yes | Yes |
| Contacts you already stored | Kept, not deleted | Kept |
| Cards you can have | 1 | 5 on Solo and Team, unlimited on Business and Agency |
| Contacts you can store | 25 | Unlimited |
| Scanning business cards | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Analytics history | 7 days | 90 days on Solo and Team, 365 days on Business and Agency |
| Export contacts to CSV / vCard | No | Yes |
| Custom domain keeps serving | No | Business and Agency only |
| NexaLink branding on the card | Shown | Removable on Business and Agency |
The card limit applies when you create a card: we do not unpublish or delete cards you already made. The contact cap works the same way — contacts above it are kept and readable, you just cannot add new ones until you upgrade. The two rows marked in bold are the ones that genuinely stop: export is a paid feature, so get your CSV out before you downgrade, and a custom domain stops being served when the entitlement ends, because serving it is the entitlement.
And the part that is not flattering
If you were on Business or Agency with cards on cards.yourcompany.com and the entitlement ends, we stop serving that domain. Your printed QR codes pointing at it stop working. The difference from the vendor-domain case is that you still own the domain — the DNS record is yours, so you can point it wherever you like, including at a redirect back to your nexalink.co card, which keeps resolving on the free plan. You lose a feature; you do not lose the address.
Why a lifetime deal changes the question
Everything above is downstream of one event: a renewal that does not happen. A card expires because a payment method expired, or a company card was cancelled with the employee who held it, or an invoice bounced during a reorganisation. Nobody plans to let a card lapse. It lapses anyway, and usually at the point when the printed cards are already out.
A one-time purchase removes that specific failure mode entirely. There is no renewal date, no card on file to expire and no invoice to bounce. NexaLink Solo is $59 once and Business is $549 once — against the cheapest verified subscription path for one person with several brands, that is $157 less over three years (73%), but the cost is the smaller half of the argument. The larger half is that there is no date on which someone else decides your card stops resolving.
What a lifetime deal does not fix
"Lifetime" means the lifetime of the product, not yours. You are still trusting a company to keep operating, and no pricing model changes that. What you can do is check two things before buying any lifetime deal, from us or anyone: can you export your full contact list on demand, and can your cards live on a domain you control? If both answers are yes, the worst case is an inconvenient migration rather than a lost network. On our plans, export is included on every paid tier and a custom domain is included on Business and Agency.
All prices in USD. NexaLink bills in USD, so a Canadian buyer is charged the USD amount.
Before you cancel anything: a five-minute checklist
In this order. Steps one and two get harder the moment the plan lapses.
- 1
Export your contacts while the plan is still paid
CSV or vCard, whichever the platform offers. Export is a paid feature on many platforms, ours included, so doing this after cancelling may not be possible.
- 2
Write down the exact URL your printed cards point at
Open your own QR code with a phone camera and copy the address it resolves to. You need the literal string, including any redirect it lands on.
- 3
Check whether that URL is on a domain you own
If it is, you control what happens next and can repoint it. If it is on the vendor's domain or a branded sub-domain of it, you cannot — plan for the printed cards to become dead links.
- 4
Read the vendor's own terms on what a lapsed account keeps
Not a comparison page, and not this one. The vendor's help centre or terms of service is the only authoritative source for their behaviour, and it is the one they will be held to.
- 5
Save the assets, not just the data
Your QR image, your card's profile photo and logo, and a screenshot of the layout. Rebuilding a card elsewhere takes ten minutes with those and an hour without them.
Common questions
What happens to your digital business card when you stop paying?
It depends on the platform, and you should read the specific vendor's terms rather than assume. In general, one of three things happens: the card keeps working but loses its paid features (custom branding, analytics, lead capture); the card drops to a restricted free tier with a lower card or contact limit; or the profile stops being served entirely. The part people underestimate is that the card's URL is usually hosted on the vendor's domain, so if the profile stops resolving, every QR code and NFC tag you already handed out points at a dead link.
Do the QR codes on my printed business cards stop working if I cancel?
A QR code is just a printed URL — it keeps encoding whatever it always encoded. Whether it still works depends entirely on whether that URL still resolves, and on who controls it. If your cards were printed with a URL on the vendor's domain, only the vendor can decide whether it resolves after you cancel, and you cannot redirect it elsewhere. If the URL is on a domain you own, you can repoint it at any time — which is the practical reason a customer-owned domain matters more than it sounds.
Can I export my contacts before I cancel a digital business card app?
Export it before you cancel, not after — on most platforms, including ours, exporting is itself a paid feature, so cancelling can remove the tool you would need to get your data out. Download a CSV or vCard of every contact, save a copy of your card's QR image, and note the exact URL your printed cards point at. Do all three while the account is still paid.
What does NexaLink's free plan keep if you stop paying?
The honest version: your card URL keeps resolving and cards you already published stay published, but the free plan is capped at 1 card and 25 stored contacts, analytics shrink to 7 days, NexaLink branding appears on the card, and CSV/vCard export is not included. Contacts you already stored above the cap are kept, not deleted — you simply cannot add more until you upgrade. A custom domain does stop serving, because a custom domain is a paid entitlement.
Is a lifetime deal actually safer than a subscription?
It removes one specific risk completely: there is no renewal date, no expiring card on file and no failed payment, so your card cannot lapse because an invoice bounced while you were travelling. It does not remove every risk — 'lifetime' means the lifetime of the product, so you are still trusting the company to keep operating. The two things worth checking before you buy any lifetime deal are whether you can export your data at any time, and whether your cards can live on a domain you own.