Stocard alternative
Stocard has gone.
Your cards do not have to
live in a payments app.
CardJar is a loyalty card wallet with no account, no sign-up and no server. It reads the screenshots you took before the shutdown, all of them at once, on your phone. 275 schemes across 5 countries get named and coloured automatically.
Not on Google Play yet
CardJar is built and tested and is going through the last checks before the Play listing opens: Android and Wear OS first, iPhone and Apple Watch after. One message, when there is something to install, and nothing else ever.
Start with the album you were told to make
Stocard users were told to screenshot their cards before the app closed. Most people did, and then sat on a camera roll full of barcodes with nowhere sensible to put them.
CardJar's import reads every barcode out of every picture you pick, names each one from its retailer catalogue, and adds the lot in a single tap. The reading happens on the phone with the camera and the network both uninvolved: nothing is uploaded, and there is nowhere for it to be uploaded to.
Schemes that mint a fresh code on every visit, the ones no wallet can ever store, are flagged in the list before you add them, rather than discovered at the front of a queue.
What actually happened to Stocard
Klarna acquired Stocard in 2021 and eventually folded its wallet into the Klarna app. The standalone Stocard app has been retired, and people who had used it for years were given a short window to move their cards across to an app that exists to do something else.
That migration went badly for a lot of people. Whether yours worked or not, the position afterwards is the same: a loyalty wallet is now a feature inside a buy-now-pay-later product, reached through an account, on a company's roadmap rather than your phone.
There is nothing improper about that. It is what happens when the thing holding your cards is a growth channel for something else. It is, though, a good reason to pick differently next time.
The test worth applying: if the company behind your loyalty app disappeared tomorrow, would your cards still open at a till? For CardJar the answer is yes, because the cards are on your phone and the app has no server to switch off. Ask it of anything you are considering, including this.
Stocard, Klarna and CardJar, side by side
| Stocard | Klarna wallet | CardJar | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account needed | Optional, for sync | Yes, a Klarna account | None. There is nothing to sign up to |
| Still there if the company moves on | No, and that is why you are here | Its roadmap, not yours | Yes. No server to switch off |
| Works with no signal | Mostly | Needs the app signed in | Entirely. Even the retailer list is on the phone |
| What it is for | Loyalty cards, plus offers | Payments, with a wallet inside | Loyalty cards. Only that |
| Bulk import from screenshots | No | No | Yes, an album at a time, on the phone |
| Watch app | Was there, on both platforms | The complaint that comes up most | Wear OS app and tile today; Apple Watch planned |
| Giving a card to a partner | No | No | A one-time copy, by QR or link, with no account either side |
| Backup | To its own servers | To Klarna | Optional, to your own Drive, encrypted with a key we never see |
| Advertising and offers | Yes | Yes | None, anywhere in the app |
| Price | Free | Free | Free |
Stocard's column describes the app as it was before it closed. Klarna's is written from its published description of the wallet inside the Klarna app; if we have any of it wrong, tell us and it gets corrected here.
Moving across, in three steps
1. Find the screenshots
They are still in your camera roll. You do not need the old app, an export file, or an account to recover anything.
2. Import the album
Tap Import from screenshots, select the pictures, and CardJar reads every barcode it can find in them and names each card from its catalogue.
3. Star the ones you use
Favourites go to the top of the jar and onto your watch. That is the whole setup: there is no account step, because there is no account.
No screenshots? Scan the plastic cards you still have, or type a number in. A card CardJar has never heard of works exactly like one it recognises.
What you get that Stocard never had
Not a replica of a closed app. Three things it could not do.
A watch that works on its own. Favourite a card and it is on your wrist, in a tile, held in the watch's own storage so it opens with your phone in another room.
Handing a card to someone. Show them a QR code, or send a link. They get their own copy to keep. Nothing links the two afterwards, no account is involved on either side, and the card travels in the part of the link browsers never send to a server.
An honest list of what leaves the phone. It is short, it is published, and it is written so it can be checked rather than believed.
Questions people arriving from Stocard ask
Can CardJar import a Stocard backup or export file?
No, and it never could have: Stocard had no open export format, and the app is gone. Screenshots are the route that actually exists, which is why CardJar reads a whole album of them at once rather than one picture at a time.
I deleted Stocard without taking screenshots. Is anything recoverable?
Not from the app, no. Most loyalty numbers are printed on the plastic card, in your account on the retailer's own website, or in the welcome email they sent you. Scan or type each one in once and it is yours from then on.
Does CardJar need an account like Klarna does?
No. There is no sign-up screen anywhere in the app. Optional backup uses your own Google account through the phone's account picker, and CardJar never sees a password.
Will this one shut down too?
We cannot promise a company will exist forever, and nobody honestly can. What we can do is make that not matter: the app has no server, so it does not stop working if we stop. Your cards are files on your phone, you can export them to a file you keep, and nothing needs our permission to open.
Are my cards the same as they were?
The number is the number. A loyalty barcode is just an account number in a machine-readable shape, so a card read out of your screenshot scans exactly as the original did.
What about Stocard's offers and discounts?
CardJar does not have them, deliberately. Offers are how a wallet earns from knowing what you buy, and that is the arrangement this app exists to avoid.
Is there an iPhone version?
Not yet. Android and Wear OS come first; iPhone and Apple Watch are planned, and the shared code was written for both from the beginning.
Somewhere for your cards that will not be sold to anyone.
Free, with no account, and an import built for exactly the album you are holding.
Not on Google Play yet
CardJar is built and tested and is going through the last checks before the Play listing opens: Android and Wear OS first, iPhone and Apple Watch after. One message, when there is something to install, and nothing else ever.