Somebody in every company can tell you the per card printing price to two decimal places. Almost nobody can tell you what the cards cost.
Those are different questions.
The invoice is the small number
A run of business cards is genuinely inexpensive. That is why the conversation usually ends there. Order a few hundred per person, they arrive, they go in the drawer, the line item is closed.
The cost that matters is not that transaction. It is how many times you repeat it, and what triggers the repeat.
What triggers a reprint
Go through the last three years at your company and count how many of these happened.
Someone was promoted. Someone changed teams. The office moved. The phone system changed and the extensions with it. The company rebranded, or refreshed the logo, or changed the domain on everyone's email. A department was renamed. A new suffix appeared on job titles because HR standardised the ladder.
Every one of those events invalidates every unused card belonging to the affected people, on the same day, whether the cards were ordered last month or last year.
That is the actual cost driver, and it is a cost driver most teams never model because each individual reprint feels small and unavoidable.
The part nobody puts a number on
Here is the expensive bit, and it never appears on any invoice.
The cards you already handed out do not change. They are in wallets and card cases and desk drawers belonging to people you want to hear from. They show a title you no longer hold, an office you no longer sit in, or a direct line that now rings on somebody else's desk.
You cannot recall them. There is no version control on paper. Somebody digs your card out eight months later, at exactly the moment you wanted them to, and calls a number that does not reach you.
That is not a printing cost. It is a lost conversation, and there is no way to count how many of those you have had, which is precisely why nobody counts them.
The honest comparison
I am not going to pretend a tap card is cheaper per unit, because it is not, and any article that tells you otherwise is selling to you rather than talking to you.
The comparison that is actually true is this. A paper card has a low unit price and a cost that repeats every time anything changes. A tap card has a higher unit price and a cost that does not repeat, because the profile is edited rather than reprinted.
Which one is cheaper depends entirely on how much your organisation changes. For a two person firm that has been in the same office for a decade, paper wins and you should keep printing. For a growing team where somebody's title changes every quarter, the maths turns, and it turns quite early.
How to work out your own number
Do not use the per card price. Use this instead.
Count the trigger events from the last three years. Multiply by the number of people affected each time. That is how many reprints you actually bought, as opposed to how many you planned. Then add the boxes currently sitting in a drawer that are already wrong, because you paid for those too.
Most people are surprised by the answer, and the surprise is never in the direction of paper being cheaper than they thought.
What to do about it
Not necessarily to stop printing. Most teams should keep some paper, for the reasons in when not to tap.
The change worth making is smaller than switching. Print fewer cards per person, on the assumption they will go out of date. Stop treating a full drawer as money in the bank, because it is closer to stock that is quietly expiring. And put the details that change most often somewhere you can edit them.