Business & Finance
Cardel
Last updated 2026-09-02 · benchmark measured 2026-10-24 — deterministic & reproducible
Cardel is a website and audience platform for creators with built-in email and shop tools.
Cardel at a glance
Cardel is a website, email, and shop platform that lets creators, authors, and small teams build a branded site and sell directly to their audience from one place.
Good for
- An author or creator who wants a website, blog, email list, and shop under one login and one domain
- A small team that wants to manage contacts, send marketing emails, and run campaign workflows from the same platform as their site
- Someone who wants to try building a site and shop before committing to pay, since payment is only required at publishing
Pricing
Starter $15/mo ($180/yr), Pro $39/mo ($468/yr), Studio $79/mo ($948/yr); free to build, pay only when you publish; custom enterprise pricing available.
Questions people ask
Do I have to pay to start using Cardel?
No, you can build your site for free and you don't pay until you publish it.
Can I use my own domain with Cardel?
Yes, all plans include using your own custom domain with HTTPS, and Cardel provides the DNS records for the site and for sending and receiving email.
What's the difference between the Starter, Pro, and Studio plans?
Starter includes a basic site with 2,000 contacts and 10 shop items but no shop payments; Pro adds shop payments, campaign workflows, scheduling, and more contacts/emails; Studio scales further with unlimited shop items and showcase pages and the highest contact and email limits.
Does Cardel take a cut of my sales?
Cardel charges a 0.5% application fee on Shop page card sales made through Stripe, and Stripe's own processing fees still apply separately.
Does Cardel include AI tools, and are there limits?
Yes, features like AI Theme Suggest, AI email template drafts, and an AI Assistant are included, with a monthly AI token allowance that does not roll over to the next month.
Written by Legit.Show from cardel.io on 2026-10-17. It does not change the score.
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To cite this score: legit.show/s/cardel-io/2026-10-24. That address never changes; this page moves with every re-measure.
Legit.Show scored Cardel 89/100 on 2026-10-24, measured across all 7 frames from its public surface. legit.show/s/cardel-io/2026-10-24
Is Cardel production-ready?
Legit.Show scores Cardel 89 out of 100 — the simple average of its 7 measured frames. Legit.Show ran its deterministic 7-Frame production-readiness benchmark on Cardel (public-surface assessment), measured from the public surface with no LLM in the scoring path. Its strongest frame is Accessibility; its weakest is Reliability. Every frame it averages is published with its evidence on the Legit.Show listing.
The 7 Frames
- Performance — 77/100
- Accessibility — 100/100
- Security — 80/100How this compares across the catalogue: The Web Security Baseline
- Privacy — 100/100How this compares across the catalogue: The Privacy Gap
- Reliability — 75/100
- Standards — 89/100
- Discoverability — 100/100
What we measured
- Security headers present: HSTS, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy.
- No Content-Security-Policy.
- Served over HTTPS with a valid certificate.
- Real Lighthouse performance run — 312 ms to first byte.
- 3 of 3 sampled routes reachable.
- Has a reachable privacy policy.
- Sets cookies / loads scripts with no consent prompt.
- Discoverable: structured data, sitemap, OpenGraph image, canonical URL.
Who built it
Orin Hutchings · product account @cardel_io
Who it's for
Authors · Professionals · Creators · Independent artists · Small teams
Pricing
Starter $69/mo ($828/yr), Pro $119/mo ($1,428/yr), Business $239/mo ($2,868/yr); custom enterprise pricing available
Sources and updates
- Description
- Taken from cardel.io's own website on 2026-09-02.
- Operator
- Cardel Technologies, LLC, as named in cardel.io's terms, privacy page or footer.
- Benchmark
- Measured by Legit.Show from the live site, the way any visitor sees it — with no access to its code or accounts. Same method for every product, and no AI decides the score. Last checked 2026-10-24.
Put together from public information, without Cardel's involvement. If anything here is wrong, tell us and a person will check it.
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