HiHello is a careful, well made product and its free tier is one of the more generous in the category. People who go looking for an alternative usually hit the same wall, and it is not the card. It is the scanner.
Everything below was read off the HiHello pricing page on July 31, 2026. Prices and limits change, so check before you commit.
What HiHello publishes
| Personal | Free forever, one user, four digital business cards, five card and badge scans a month. |
|---|---|
| Professional | $6 per month or $72 billed yearly, one user, 16 cards, 20 card and badge scans a month. |
| Business | $5 per user per month or $60 per user per year, for 5 to 100 users, with unlimited cards and unlimited scans. |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing, for 101 users and above. |
All figures are in US dollars. No rupee pricing is published on that page.
Why the scan cap matters more in India
In the market this product was designed for, the flow is mostly outward. You send your card, other people send you theirs digitally, and scanning paper is occasional.
In India the paper is still the default. One trade exhibition, one channel partner meet, one wedding season of vendor meetings, and you are holding thirty cards. Five scans a month does not touch that, and twenty is one busy evening.
- • A property agent after a launch weekend can be holding forty cards.
- • A caterer during wedding season collects vendor cards at every venue.
- • A sales executive on a week of field visits comes back with a shirt pocket full.
- • A CA at a seminar picks up a dozen without trying.
For all four, the count that matters is cards received, not cards sent. Any product that meters the receiving side is going to feel tight.
Where HiHello is better than what we build
- • Four cards on the free plan, which is more separate personas than Ahoyy gives away free.
- • Badge scanning at events, which is a real workflow for conference heavy jobs.
- • A per user Business plan that scales cleanly from five people to a hundred.
- • A longer history and a larger support team than a newer Indian product has.
If you attend a lot of international conferences and want several distinct cards without paying, HiHello free is genuinely hard to beat. That is a real answer and it is worth saying out loud.
The alternatives, and what each is for
| Ahoyy | Card scanning is not metered on the free plan. Free card, free QR code, WhatsApp sharing, rupee billing. Paid plans at ₹299 and ₹799 a month cover directory reveals, not scanning. |
|---|---|
| Blinq | Free plan gives two cards. Premium is $9.99 a month, or $7.33 a month billed annually, for up to five cards. The contact scanner sits on the paid plan. |
| Uniqode | Free plan for a first card, Team at $6 per user per month billed annually. The pricing page states there are no monthly plans. |
| Popl | No published prices. Book a call for a quote. Built around events and lead capture at company scale. |
| Mobilo | Hardware first. On 31 July 2026 a branded NFC card was on sale at $5.00 one time against a $19.99 regular price, and a custom design at $10.00. Each includes 90 days of Pro. Pro is $3.00 a month after that. Sale prices move, so check on the day. |
Before you compare features, count the cards on your desk from the last three months. That number tells you which product you actually need.
Scan the stack, keep the notes, and share your own card. Free, and billed in rupees when you do pay.
Try the card scannerScanning is only half the job
A scanner that only reads a card gives you a name and a number, which is roughly what the card already gave you. The value shows up in what happens to the contact afterwards.
- 1. One line of note, written the same day, in the words you would search for later.
- 2. Where you met the person, recorded automatically rather than remembered badly.
- 3. A search that works on the note, not only on the name.
- 4. The ability to bring in your existing phonebook, so the new contacts sit next to the old ones.
When you compare products, compare these four rather than the scan count alone. A high scan limit on a product with no notes is a faster way of building a pile you cannot use.
One more thing worth checking, and it applies to every product in this article. Optical card reading is never perfect. Indian cards are unusually hard, because they carry two scripts, ornate logos, three phone numbers and a designation printed in a decorative font down the side. Whatever you pick, test it on five of your own cards before you decide anything.
The test that matters is not whether the name came out right. It is how quickly you can fix it when it did not. A product that makes correction a two tap job beats one with a slightly better reader and a clumsy edit screen.
The short version
If you send more cards than you receive, and you want several free personas, HiHello free is a good place to stay.
If your problem is a stack of paper cards from Indian meetings and a phonebook full of half remembered names, you want a product that does not charge you per scan and speaks rupees. That is where Ahoyy is aimed, and it is newer and smaller than HiHello, which you should factor in.