Made in Haarlem, by one person with a name

Where the idea came from

From Bijdehand, the iPhone app that already does loyalty cards the way they should be done. It is a good app, and without it Stapel would not exist. The only problem with it is that it is not on Android.

So Stapel is not a competitor, it is the Android answer. There is no connection between the two projects, no collaboration and no shared code. If you have an iPhone, go to Bijdehand.

Why the app exists

At the till, a loyalty card is three actions: open the app, find the card, turn up the brightness, with a queue behind you. Stapel does one thing: make sure the cashier scans it first time. There is no second screen trying to sell you something, because there is nothing to sell.

Why there is a name on it

Why would you believe an app is not forwarding your card numbers? The answer cannot be "because the website says so". It is a name, a place, store data you can check for yourself, and claims narrow enough to check. The app's source code is not public yet, so until it is, the other three have to carry it.

Depth in every country, and not by accident

Good free software for keeping cards already exists; Catima has done it well for years. What does not exist is depth country by country: the chains that actually operate there, their colours, their programmes under the names they carry now, and enough store locations to make arrival detection work. It started in the Netherlands, where I live and whose shops come with the app. Every other country gets the same app once you download its store data; which countries those are is on the store data page.

What it costs, and what it does not

Free, and staying free. No pro tier, no subscription, no adverts, no data being sold. A way to donate arrives if you want one, and that is the entire funding model.

That is not a philosophy, it is a construction: no server to pay for, no user administration, no team. An app that costs nothing to run needs nothing from you.

Other people's brands

Retail chain names and logos belong to those chains and are named here only so that shops can be named. The app ships brand logos, from Wikimedia Commons and from the chains’ own sites, to make a card recognisable; the provenance and licence of each is in the app. A chain without a logo gets the brand colour and an icon instead. If a chain disagrees, one message through Contribute is enough.

Licence

The application code is under the Apache License 2.0 and is not published at the moment. The store data stands apart from it: derived from OpenStreetMap and under the ODbL regardless of anything else. See Store data.

Contact

hallo@square-management.nl. A dedicated address, never a personal one. Better still through the reports on GitHub, because there you can see what happens to what you reported.

About this website

Hand-written HTML and one stylesheet. No framework, no build step, no font from someone else's server, no cookies. This page loads four files from this server: itself, the stylesheet, one font and the icon in your tab. Beyond that, one script from Cloudflare: Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without identifying you. That is the only outbound request, and blocking it is fine: the site behaves exactly the same.

That is not modesty, it is the evidence: a privacy app whose site is full of trackers refutes itself. One cookieless counter is where the line sits.