It has a weird name, I know. The idea is that it’s supposed to be your digital calling card, so that’s why it’s called Carrd, with two rr’s. It’s also not a .com which is also confusing. It’s .co which isn’t convenient.

Here’s the thing, though. You can get started for free. While this does have some limitations, for those people who are just starting their personal business or personal brand, this is pretty cool; until you are generating revenue, free is pretty cool. There aren’t many free web hosts out there anymore, and feature-for-feature, Carrd offers more than the competition, yes, even Wix.

Now let me be honest, none of the free website hosts offer the one most important feature: your own domain name, your .com. Well Google does, but its features are so lackluster that it shouldn’t be included in this discussion. All the other “free” services will make you use their .whatever.com at the end of your chosen company/personal name.

Carrd will too. So, if you want to use your own CompanyName.com domain, then you won’t be able to do that for free. It sucks, I know, but not all things in the world are free and perfect. So just be aware of that. Even with Carrd, you can’t have your own .com domain if you also want it to be completely free. But the competition isn’t any better.

Let’s consider the alternatives

Almost all small business owners have a website. Most of them created this on their own using one of the other popular platforms – Wix and WordPress, and even Google (ugh!) come to mind for those on a budget. Here’s the problem: it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t simple, and it wasn’t really free once you discovered you had to purchase add-ons and maybe even hire help.

More to the point, this website likely isn’t generating a ROI (Return On Investment) for you. Even if you didn’t invest money, you invested time and now the site is just sitting there, requiring monthly payments but not generating income. It’s a money pit but now that you have it, you can’t really get rid of it. It has become one of those dreaded “necessary expenses.”

This is because people look at it every so often. It certainly isn’t the traffic you had hoped for, but now that people are going there, you have to keep it. You might even be lucky enough that your site is ranking high enough on Google search that it appears above the fold (near the top, so people don’t have to scroll). Yes, you are stuck with it.

If it’s just going to be a simple placeholder, then wouldn’t it be nice if it didn’t cost so much to keep up?

Consider paying a little for your site instead of a lot.

Look, I get it. You don’t like the fact that your site costs you money every month, so the thought of switching to something else that also costs money isn’t going to make you jump. You could switch to the free version of Carrd, but then you would lose your .com domain, the one you fought so hard to acquire.

However, here is where Carrd shines. Their free tier doesn’t include a domain which sucks, but their next tier that does include your own domain is only $20. By the way, that’s $20 for the whole year. This works out to about $1.67 per month! Now how many website hosts cost that little? Not one. I know because I’ve searched high and low.

Even more impressive is that this $20 for the whole year doesn’t just buy you one website, but 10. That’s right, you can have 10 different websites for under two dollars per month. So, if you used them all, that would be about 17 cents per month per site! Find me another website hosting service that offers that!

You might think you don’t need ten websites, and I get that, but at this price, it’s even a great deal for a single site. You simply can’t beat it. It’s an awesome deal, period.

What you get for under $2 per month

A lot more than you think; and certainly a lot more than what anyone else offers. You get unlimited data transfers (no more throttling of your site when you reach your limits), great templates, an easy learning curve, stock images to use, video support, and even QR codes. You also get advanced features like fill-out forms, widgets, Google Analytics support, and a large selection of fonts. All for under $2 per month, or to be specific, 17 cents per month!

Now I don’t want to mislead anyone. It’s not a full-fledged website hosting service. It does not offer features for setting up a blog or a shopping cart. But here’s my opinion about those: you should have those somewhere else, on their own site.

For example, a blog should be on a platform dedicated to that function like Medium, HubPages, or SubStack so that you can also generate income from it. Likewise, if you run an online store, you should be doing that on Shopify, Square, BigCommerce, or one of the other many options. You can just link to these from your Carrd.co site, so this isn’t a necessary feature from your website host.

You should think of your website as a lobby, a portal to everything else you offer online. Carrd can do just that. You can include your bio, your story, and any other marketing materials, but for everything else, you can direct them to the appropriate service.

Carrd should be your landing page. It should be a centralized signpost on the internet for all the other things you offer. It should also be the central hub for linking to all your social media pages, and Carrd is uniquely positioned to serve that function. Ultimately, this is what your website should be. It may be hard to believe, but the era of the “everything-website” is over.

Have you tried Carrd? Are you considering switching from your current website host? Let me know what you think about it.Why Card may just be a better website host for you.