How Much Do Business Cards Cost? Pack and Per-Card Prices

Why Does the Per Card Price Drop So Fast?

The per card price falls because almost none of the cost is the card. Paper and ink are pennies. What costs money happens once per job: checking the file, building the imposition, setting the press, running the first sheet, and cutting the stack square on a guillotine.

Those steps cost the same whether the run is 50 cards or 3,000. So the first 50 cards carry the entire setup on their own backs, which is how they land at about a dollar each. By 1,000 the same setup is spread across twenty times as many cards and you are paying about a dime apiece. Past 1,000 the curve flattens, because you have stopped paying for setup and started paying for paper.

That math has one practical consequence. Ordering the same cards twice is the expensive way to buy them. Two packs of 250 is $139.98 for 500 cards. One pack of 500 is $89.99. Same cards, same press, $49.99 apart, entirely because the second order pays for setup a second time.

What Do You Actually Pay at Checkout?

At most two lines can appear on a business card order beyond the pack price, and one of them is optional.

No setup fee. For when you already have a design and you want exactly that printed. Upload any image or file, from Canva, ChatGPT, Gemini, a PDF or a phone photo, and we make it press ready: size, bleed, resolution and color. That work is already in the pack price.

Design it for me, +$30. For when you have a logo and an idea but no layout. A designer builds the card from scratch to the print specs and you get two rounds of revisions.

Ground shipping, a flat $10 per order. Not per pack, not by weight, not by distance. Cards are printed in the USA and shipped to any address in all 50 states for that same $10, so four packs on one order still ship for $10.

Three worked examples, all in:

• 250 cards, any file you have: $69.99 + $10 shipping = $79.99
• 500 cards, any file you have: $89.99 + $10 shipping = $99.99
• 1,000 cards, designed for you: $109.99 + $30 + $10 = $149.99

A free digital proof is included at every quantity. Production runs 48 hours once you approve that proof, with transit on top. If the cards have a date attached to them, count backward from proof approval rather than from the moment you click order.

Is Double Sided Printing Extra on a Business Card?

No. Single sided and double sided cost exactly the same on our 16pt cards, at every rung of the ladder. A 500 pack is $89.99 whether you print one face or two.

That matters more than it sounds like it should, because the back is the only free advertising space a small business is ever handed. A contractor can list heating, roofing and electrical there. A restaurant can print hours and a QR code to the online menu. A church office can print service times. A bilingual business can run the whole card again in a second language. Leaving the back blank costs the same as using it, which makes a blank back the most expensive empty space in print. For what belongs on each face, read what information should be on a business card.

How Many Business Cards Should You Order?

Buy about a six month supply, then round up one rung. Six months is long enough to earn the volume discount and short enough that your phone number, your title and your service list are still true when the last card leaves the box.

Order 250 when the details might change. A new hire, a brand mid refresh, a second phone line on trial, an agent about to switch brokerages. At $69.99 you are buying cards you can afford to reprint, and being able to afford the reprint is the whole point.

Order 500 to 750 when you are settled and networking lightly. This is most small businesses: a monthly chamber breakfast, a few dozen cards left on counters, one card per estimate. At $89.99 and $99.99 the per card cost has already cleared the steep part of the curve.

Order 1,000 or more when handing out cards is a habit. Contractors, agents, sales teams and restaurant owners burn through cards faster than they plan for. At $109.99 for 1,000 or $169.99 for 2,000 you are paying about a dime or eight cents a card, and you pay the $10 shipping only once.

Order 50 or 100 only for a short, specific reason. One conference, a weekend market, a trial run of a new layout before you commit. They are the most expensive cards per piece on the board, and that is fine when 50 is genuinely all you need.

Whichever rung you pick, the money is wasted if the file is wrong, so start with standard business card size, bleed and safe zone.

How Much Do Metal Business Cards Cost?

Brushed aluminum cards start at $129.99 for 50 single sided and $139.99 for 50 double sided in the 0.025 in thickness, and $169.99 for 50 single sided in the heavier 0.040 in. A pack of 100 in 0.025 in aluminum is $229.99 single sided and $239.99 double sided.

Fifty metal cards cost more than a thousand paper ones, and for the right person they still make sense: a closer, a founder, a high ticket service where the card itself is part of the pitch. Notice also that metal charges for the second side, which paper does not, so a double sided metal card is a real upgrade decision rather than a free one.

The strategy that usually wins is both. A thousand standard cards for everyday handouts, plus a small pack of aluminum hard cards for the meetings that matter. We ran the full comparison in paper vs metal business cards.

Do Cheap Business Cards Cost More in the End?

A cheap card costs more when it has to be reprinted, and the thing that forces a reprint is almost never the paper. It is a wrong digit in a phone number, an email address that moved, or a file built without bleed that comes back with a white sliver down one edge.

Thickness is where the price difference is honest. A 14pt card and a 16pt card cost about the same to print, and the 16pt is the one people notice in a handshake, which is why our standard card is 16pt rather than the thinner stock a race to the bottom would pick. We measured both in 16pt versus 14pt cardstock.

Where cheap genuinely costs more is quantity splitting and rush. Ordering 250 now and 250 again in March costs $139.98 instead of $89.99, and an order placed the week of an event pays for overnight freight that a flat $10 ground shipment would have covered if it left ten days earlier.

What We See on Proofs

The most expensive business card order we see is the second one, placed two or three weeks after the first. It is almost always the same story: a small pack went out the door, the owner handed out forty of them at one event, and now the same press setup and the same shipping get paid all over again for another small pack.

The second thing we see is people worrying about the file. A card designed in a slide deck or exported from a phone app is not press ready, and there is no setup fee for fixing that: we rebuild it and show you the result on the proof. A PDF at 3.75 x 2.25 inches with bleed, CMYK, 300 dpi and fonts outlined still gets you to that proof fastest.

The third is the blank back on a paid double sided order. Single and double sided cost the same, so a blank back is space you already bought and did not use. When we send the proof and point that out, the file comes back with hours, a QR code or a service list on it about half the time, and it never costs the customer another dollar.

What Is Included in Every Order

Every business card order includes a free digital proof, 48 hour production once you approve it, and full color printing on both sides at no extra charge. Nothing on the list is an upsell at checkout.

If you would rather start from a layout than a price list, the business card maker puts the design first and the pack second, and both card products sit side by side on the business cards category page. If you are still comparing quotes from other shops, the 10 questions to ask before buying business cards will tell you whether the number you were given is a real total or a starting price. For anything outside the standard pack sizes, including rounded corner and square cards, ask us at our contact page or call (210) 293-5651 and we will price it by hand.