I'm the founder of Gingr (gingrapp.com). We're a SaaS product that is geared towards pet care facilities which helps small business owners operate more efficiently. Think a POS+ERP+CRM for a specific niche industry.

We recently thought up a new feature that we want to implement. However, it requires a hardware piece. Basically, we want to add a feature where:

- The business issues a tag to their customer

- When the customer arrives at the business the tag is read

- When a tag is read, it notifies our software with the tag ID

- Our software will locate that customer in our system and bring up their record for easy access at the reception desk

Range is key here. Would definitely need to be contactless. Ideally the tag could be read when the customer enters the parking lot, before they even step foot in the building.

The problem is that nobody on our team has experience working with RFID/BLE/NFC/etc.. technology. I'm wondering if anyone here on HN does have experience in this realm. What technology did you pick and why?

I did find a company called Kontakt (kontakt.io) that sells BLE readers/beacons. My concern is that they may be a small company that could disappear tomorrow. Does anyone here have experience with them?

Also open to paying someone to consult with us on this project- specifically around identifying hardware to use.

Didn't know where else to reach out, so I'm posting here! If this is against the rules, I'm sorry and please feel free to delete it.