CDLY
Your Reputation, on Autopilot
CDLY gives every professional a polished digital business card — shareable via QR code, saveable as a vCard — and pairs it with a smart Google Reviews engine. Happy customers get routed to leave public five-star reviews; unhappy ones reach you privately first. The result: more reviews, better ratings, zero awkward asks.
Key Features
Built With
The problem
The lead is lost between the handshake and the follow-up
A paper card transfers information in one direction and then stops. The person who received it has to type the number in, remember the context, and act before the card is lost. Most of that does not happen, and the business has no way to know it did not.
The second loss is quieter. For a local business — a clinic, a salon, a restaurant, an agent — the Google rating is a substantial part of how new customers decide. Reviews mostly arrive from the two extremes: people who were delighted, and people who were angry. The large middle, satisfied but unprompted, never writes anything.
Ask everyone for a review and you route your unhappy customers to the most public place you own. Ask nobody and the rating drifts on whatever the extremes contribute.
Why it exists
One link that does the three things a card cannot
CDLY collapses the card, the lead form and the review request into a single shareable link and QR. Because it is a web page rather than a printed object, it can change after it is handed over, and it can report what happened after the handover.
The distinctive mechanic is the review routing. Rather than sending every customer to Google, the flow asks first, then forks: a strongly positive response goes to the public Google review, and anything below that is captured privately as feedback the owner sees and the internet does not.
That is a product decision with a defensible logic — it collects the criticism where it can be acted on, and asks for the public review only from the people who were going to say something good. It is not a way to suppress bad reviews; a customer can always leave one directly.
How it works
From a scan to a captured lead
- 01
One QR, one link
A single code on a card, a counter, a window or an email signature resolves to a public profile page that works without an app on either side.
- 02
The card acts
The profile is a set of actions rather than a display: save the contact to the phone, open WhatsApp, dial, get directions, or pay by UPI — each one tap, no typing.
- 03
The lead is captured
A contact form on the profile records who was interested, and the owner is alerted on WhatsApp immediately rather than discovering it in an inbox later.
- 04
The review is routed
Smart Fork asks for a rating first. Four stars and above is directed to the public Google review; below that is captured as private feedback for the owner.
Who it is for
Who actually uses this
- Solo professionals
- Doctors, lawyers, consultants, freelancers and agents — the people whose business is largely reputation and referral, and for whom the free tier is the whole product rather than a trial.
- Local businesses with a counter
- Restaurants, salons and clinics, where the QR lives on a table or a desk and the Google rating is a meaningful share of how new customers choose.
- Sales teams
- The paid tier is seat-based with bulk operations, for organisations issuing and updating cards across a team rather than one person maintaining their own.
What it does
Capabilities, in detail
The card
Tap to save contact
Writes the contact straight to the phone's address book — no transcription, no typo in the number.
UPI payments
Accept payment from the same page that made the introduction, which for many Indian small businesses is the whole transaction.
Live map directions
For anyone whose business has a physical location that customers have to actually find.
Thirteen industry templates
Layouts shaped for specific trades rather than one generic card, with public demos for professional, restaurant, healthcare, real-estate and beauty.
Custom domain and verified badge
Available as add-ons, and bundled into the team tier.
Leads and reviews
Smart Fork
Rating-first routing: strong ratings to the public Google review, weaker ones to private feedback the owner can act on.
Instant WhatsApp alerts
The lead reaches the owner on the channel they already have open, not one they have to remember to check.
Private feedback capture
The complaint arrives as a message rather than as a public one-star review.
Per-link tracking and analytics
Which link, which channel, which card — so sharing can be attributed rather than guessed at.
Engineering
Decisions we took, and what they cost
- Built for Indian payment and messaging rails
- Razorpay for payments, UPI as a first-class method, MSG91 for messaging. These are not interchangeable with the Stripe-and-Twilio default; choosing them is what makes the product usable by the businesses it targets.
- Hosted in India, and billed like an Indian business
- Azure's India region for hosting and GST-compliant invoicing. For a domestic SMB buyer, an invoice they cannot claim input credit against is a real objection, not a detail.
- A public page has to be fast on a bad connection
- The card is opened from a scan, usually on mobile data, often once. Cloudflare sits in front of it. A profile that takes three seconds has already lost the interaction it existed to capture.
- Free forever means the free tier has to be nearly free to serve
- Unlimited cards at zero cost is only survivable if a card view is a cached static read. The commercial model constrains the architecture rather than the other way round.
- Separate marketing site and dashboard
- The public site and the authenticated dashboard are deployed independently, so the marketing surface can iterate without touching the application people rely on.
Technology
What it is built on
- Application
- Next.jsTypeScriptSeparate authenticated dashboard
- Infrastructure
- Azure (India region)Cloudflare
- Payments & messaging
- RazorpayUPICards / net bankingMSG91Resend
Commercial model
How it is priced, publicly
Free
₹0 foreverUnlimited digital cards, all thirteen templates, unlimited lead capture and analytics. No card required, no expiry.
Business
₹999 / monthFive seats, bulk operations and a bundled custom domain, for teams issuing cards rather than individuals.
Enterprise
On quoteFor agencies and larger deployments.
Review add-ons
Starter / Pro / BusinessThe review-routing product as a separate line, available on any plan, with a combined bundle.
What it taught us
What transfers to client work
- Indian payment rails are a product decision, not an integration task
- UPI, Razorpay and GST invoicing change what the checkout, the refund path and the accounting export have to do. Retrofitting them onto a system designed around card-first Western defaults is substantially more work than starting from them.
- A permanently free tier is an architectural constraint
- It has to be answerable at cache cost. That pushes static generation, edge caching and a hard split between the cheap public surface and the expensive authenticated one — decisions that are painful to introduce later.
- Conditional routing beats a blanket ask
- Smart Fork is a small piece of logic with a large effect on outcome, and it generalises: asking a qualifying question before choosing a destination applies to support escalation, NPS follow-up and onboarding paths just as much as to reviews.
Related work
Building something for Indian small businesses?
UPI, GST invoicing, WhatsApp as the primary channel, and a free tier that has to be cheap to serve — CDLY is where we worked those out. Tell us what you are building and we will tell you what it costs to get them right.
Services this draws on
- Web development
Public pages that have to load fast on mobile data, first time, every time.
- SaaS development
Seat-based tiers, bulk operations and a free tier that has to pay for itself.
- API development
Payment, messaging and review integrations that have to survive retries.