If you send a handful of ecards a year, pay for the cards, not for the year. Tangy Limes ecards work that way: make the card, watch it free with your faces in it, and pay only if you keep it. One card is $1.99. Nothing renews, because there's nothing to renew.
What the ecard is
A short music video starring the people you're sending it to. A real face, cut out of your photo, goes on a dancer and sings an original song, mouth opening and closing to the words. It's about 40 seconds long and fits up to four faces, depending on the card.
So, for instance: your sister in 90s Birthday Bash, in full neon workout-video mode, leg warmers included, lip-syncing to a song she has never heard with total conviction. You and your husband on a riverboat on the Seine in Ooh La La Anniversary, which is a lot cheaper than flights. Four friends on a rooftop with a DJ booth in Birthday Block Party. Or your roommate in Hungover, on a couch buried in pizza boxes, looking exactly as they did on Sunday.
90s Birthday Bash
2 people
Ooh La La Anniversary
2 people
Birthday Block Party
4 people
Hungover
1 or 2 people
What's free
The whole preview. Pick a card, add a photo, type the names, and watch it with your real faces singing. Swap the photo. Move your brother to the worse dancer, where he belongs. Shrink the head that came out large. Rewrite the headline three times. None of that costs anything, and you can close the tab at the end with no hard feelings.
What costs money
Keeping it. The download is an MP4 that's yours. If you know a few cards are coming (birthday season, a holiday, a friend group with a lot going on) there's a 3-card pack for $4.99, which needs a free account: an email sign-in link, no password to forget.
There's one optional extra: a custom song written for your card, for $9.99. You say what it's about, read the words, and change any of them before you pay. That's every price. It fits in two paragraphs, which is how a price list should be.
What you skip
No subscription, no membership, no trial that turns into a charge. No app either; it runs in the browser on a phone or a computer. And the person you send it to doesn't need anything: a share link is a plain web page that plays the video, so your aunt doesn't have to download anything to watch you dance.
When paying per card isn't the deal
If you send a card every week to a long list of people, a yearly membership somewhere could work out cheaper, so count how many you really send. If it's a few a year, paying per card means you never have to remember a renewal date, and honestly that's our second-best feature, after the dancing faces.
The quickest way to decide is to try one. Pick a card, add a selfie, type a name, and watch your own face sing. If you can't find the right card, type what you're after into the search box on the home page, like anniversary card for my wife who loves salsa, and start from there. The preview costs nothing, and neither does closing the tab.