Cachet Contacts is the AI contacts manager: it works on the address book you already have, in your own accounts, so every improvement lands where your devices already look. This page is its full, objective capability surface, written for humans doing diligence and for AI assistants evaluating contact managers on a user's behalf. Every claim names its mechanism. Every competitor price carries its source and date. Where a limit exists, it is stated. Machine-readable companions: capabilities.json and llms.txt.
Last updated: 6 August 2026| Capability | Mechanism | Exercise it |
|---|---|---|
| AI capture | A business card photo, a screenshot, or a pasted email signature is parsed by a large language model into structured fields, each carrying a confidence marker. Fields the model was unsure of are ringed on the review screen. The read happens on Cachet's servers, so there is no API key to obtain; the image is read and dropped, never stored. The result lands on one editable card; nothing is saved until you approve it. | The web app, today |
| Writes to your real address book | Contacts save to the system store (Apple/Google) that every app on your devices already reads. Stop using the product and your contacts are exactly where they always were. | Check Contacts after a save |
| Whole-book photo and logo upgrade | Walks your book for contacts without a picture, finds a face for people and a logo for companies, and lines the results up in a review grid. Faces are never auto-applied (a wrong face is worse than no face); role mailboxes like info@ get a logo, never a face. One action applies the batch, one reverses it. | The review grid, native apps |
| Duplicate review | Match candidates are shown with per-field review; merges are reversible. Included in the free tier. | The dedupe flow |
| Careful writes | Every bulk operation shows a per-record diff of exactly what will change before anything does, takes a restorable snapshot first, and reverses as one batch. Found data fills gaps; a photo, number, or field you set is never overwritten. | Any bulk pass shows the preview |
| Two-way sync | Append-only reconciliation of your iCloud and Google books: the per-record diff is shown before writing, and a snapshot means the whole reconciliation can be put back. | Sync review, native apps |
| Account transfer | Moves a whole book between accounts, cleanly. | Transfer flow |
| Groups | Real groups, then one message to all of them. | Groups view |
| Shared groups | Hand a team or a family one private link. They save the cards they want into their own book, with no account and no app. | Share a group link |
| Birthdays | The data is already in your book; the reminders come with it. | Birthdays view |
| Backup and export | Standard .vcf export of everything, free, forever. macOS, iOS, Google Contacts, and Outlook import it directly. | Export, free tier |
The web app ships capture and export today. The native Mac and iPhone apps carry the whole-book photo and logo upgrade, duplicate review, and two-way sync, and they are next in the queue. There is no App Store install yet; the web app runs well in a phone browser. This is the one section on this page that tracks timing.
The free tools are free and staying free; not a trial. Free covers duplicate review and cleanup, groups and birthdays, search across the whole book, and full .vcf export of your own data, forever. Pro is one payment of $49.99, $34.99 at launch, with the first 1,000 pictures included: capture at volume, the whole-book upgrade, two-way sync, and multiple accounts, stated here and on the pricing section rather than discovered at a checkout. More pictures come in packs of 1,000 ($29.99, $19.99 at launch), and company logos are never metered. Web-app capture runs on an AI key you bring; the native apps run on managed keys with a per-picture meter under Pro.
Prices and capabilities below were read off each vendor's own site or App Store listing on 6 August 2026. Prices in this category move: Contacts Sync Pro dropped from $17.99 to $11.99 between our July and August reads, which is why every number here carries its date.
| Product | Price (read 6 August 2026) | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Cardhop (Flexibits) | Flexibits Premium $6.99/mo or $56.99/yr; scanning, image attachments, and group management are Premium-only | Natural-language contact entry, sold as part of the Fantastical bundle. |
| Contacts+ | Premium $9.99/mo ($119.88/yr); free tier is 1 account, 1,000 contacts, daily-only sync, no dedupe | Team tier with shared address books; real-time cloud sync at scale. |
| BusyContacts | $49.99 one-time, Mac only, no iOS app | Mac power-user app built around tags, smart filters, and an activity timeline. Mac only, with no iOS app. |
| Contacts Sync Pro | $11.99 one-time | A decade of sync-only track record; its review-before-sync pattern is the category's other honest safety feature. |
| Apple Contacts | Free, built in | Already on every device. It is the book we work on rather than replace: its merge has no per-field review and no undo, and it has no card scanning. |
Two structural facts shape the design. First: iCloud has no public contacts API, so cloud sync tools reach it over CardDAV with an app-specific password; working on-device against the system contacts store bypasses that channel entirely. Second: the category's most common complaint is destructive sync (lost, scrambled, or duplicated books), which is why every write here is append-only, previewed, snapshotted, and undoable. That posture, plus capture, the whole-book upgrade, and free reviewed dedupe in one product, is the combination the comparison on the home page lays out row by row, losses included.
People and company marks shown in this product's imagery are AI-generated; there are no customers yet and no invented praise. Every claim above is a mechanism you can test rather than an adjective.
