Fideliya takes the paper punch card and puts it in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. The mechanic does not change: buy nine, get the tenth free. What changes is that the card cannot be lost, cannot be forged, and finally tells you something. Paper got the psychology right, which is why it has lasted forty years. It is the medium that fails, not the idea.
Why paper fails
A paper card has to survive a pocket, a bag, a wash cycle and the customer remembering to bring it. When it does not, the customer loses their progress, and losing progress is more discouraging than never starting.
It can also be copied. The most famous stamp card in the world was killed by exactly that. Subway ran its Sub Club from the 1980s: eight stamps for a six-inch sub, ninth free. On 2 June 2005 the Associated Press reported that Subway was ending the program, because counterfeit stamps and pre-filled cards were being sold on online auction sites and franchisees were increasingly finding fakes among their redemptions. It was phased out company-wide by that October. Subway brought Sub Club back in December 2025, and it came back digital.
The most successful stamp card ever run was destroyed by paper, and returned twenty years later as software.
What a Fideliya card does instead
Every stamp is logged against a named customer with a timestamp, so nobody adds one without a scan. The card sits in the wallet next to boarding passes and bank cards, updates in real time at the counter, and cannot be left at home. Staff scan from a browser, so there is nothing to install on the counter device.
The part paper never offered is visibility. Fideliya shows you visit history per customer, how often each one comes in, and who has quietly stopped. That is the difference between running a loyalty program and hoping one is working.
What the card looks like
Fideliya ships 24 designed pass themes with twelve on the free plan, each built as a color set rather than assembled from a picker, with your logo on every one and cover images on Pro. A paper card is whatever the print shop offers, reprinted every time you change anything.
Making the switch
Run both for the first month. Put a QR code on the counter tent, train staff with one sentence, and honor the count on any existing paper card when its holder enrolls so nobody loses progress. By the second month most enrollments will be digital.
Fideliya also grows past stamps when the program is ready: points for customers who spend more per visit, referrals for regulars who bring friends, and gift cards for December. Same platform, same customers, no second migration.
What it costs
Fideliya is free for 20 customers with stamps or points, wallet passes included, twelve themes and a campaign a month. Pro at €49.99 raises that to 1,000 customers, the remaining twelve themes, cover images, gift cards, the referral program, CSV export and four team seats. Paper costs less per card and more per reprint, and it never returns any data at all.