SwissJobs.app or cvpics.ch — AI builder or an application service with photos?

Feature comparison

Everything about cvpics.ch was read from the vendor's own page on 4 September 2026; our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow. "not stated" means it could not be read on their site — not "does not exist".

Pricing side by side

Everything about cvpics.ch was read from the vendor's own page on 4 September 2026; our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow. "not stated" means it could not be read on their site — not "does not exist".

What each side actually sells

cvpics.ch describes itself on its own home page as specialising in application photos and staff photos, with studios in Zurich, Bern, Basel, St. Gallen and Lucerne. The process is set out step by step: book and pay online, get access to a style guide immediately after booking, a shoot in several poses, retouching of blemishes and shadows, delivery «in der Regel als JPEG (auf Wunsch auch als RAW) in nur wenigen Stunden per Mail» — normally as JPEG, on request as RAW, within a few hours by email. Cancellation is possible up to 48 hours before the appointment. The entry price depends on which of their pages you land on: the home page title says from CHF 59, the photo page says from CHF 49, the price page from CHF 49.90. Their imprint explains why that is not a contradiction — the individual locations are run by franchisees, so the price sits with the location.

Around that core sits a shop. Design templates cost CHF 9.90 each, two of them marked down from CHF 14.90; the all-in-one combo with four templates and fifty sentence blocks costs CHF 29.90 instead of CHF 49.90. A cover-letter tool bundled with seven CV templates costs CHF 39 once, licensed to the buyer by name for private use. Swapping the background on a LinkedIn portrait costs CHF 29.90 and offers twenty-nine blurred backgrounds. Salary-negotiation training costs CHF 99, having a Swiss employer reference checked costs CHF 140 and having one written costs CHF 190. A bespoke design is available on request «Preis ab 100 CHF».

Two prices are worth reading twice, because the tile and the form disagree. The CV check is announced on the home page at CHF 49.90; the booking form itself lists «CV Check (100 CHF)» and «CV Check Pro (199 CHF)», with a coupon field and a stated existing-customer price of CHF 50. The written dossier is announced at «ab 380 CHF»; the booking form charges CHF 399 for Paket Gold with under five years of experience, CHF 499 for over five years and CHF 799 for Paket Platin — and CHF 374, CHF 474 and CHF 774 in the version that carries the advertised CHF 25 discount for booking with a shoot. Compare on the form prices. That is the number that gets charged.

The German-only problem, and why it is bigger than it looks

cvpics.ch publishes in one language. There is no French, Italian or English edition: the site declares itself German, and the addresses /fr, /it and /en all return an error page. For the photo itself that matters little — a photographer can work around a language, and plenty do. For everything else on their price list it matters a great deal, because everything else is words.

Their cover-letter tool works by asking you questions and assembling an answer from checked sentence blocks; the questions and the blocks are German. Their CV check is a specialist reading your document and writing comments into it; she works in German. Their fifty sentence blocks are German sentences. If you are applying in English to a Zurich employer — and a quarter of the adverts in the studio cantons whose language we record are in English — the only part of that shop you can use is the picture.

This is also where the neighbouring-country reflex costs people. A reader arriving from the United Kingdom or the United States has learned that a photo on a CV is a liability, and leaves it off. A reader arriving from Germany has learned the same thing, for a different legal reason. Switzerland did not follow either of them; the photo is conventional here, and the official application guidance treats it as part of the personal-details block. We have a separate answer on how far that convention goes and what the official page says in each language — the point for this comparison is narrower: the thing you were planning to skip is the one thing cvpics.ch is genuinely good at.

A studio has a map. Software does not

This sounds obvious until you measure it. We took the open adverts in our own stock and resolved the canton from the location field, using the same lookup that drives the location filters on the site. Of the open adverts whose canton can be resolved, 56.1 per cent sit in the five cantons that have a studio — Zurich, Bern, Basel-Stadt, St. Gallen and Lucerne. 27.1 per cent sit in French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino, where there is no studio at all. 16.8 per cent are spread across the remaining cantons. Zurich on its own accounts for 30.5 per cent.

For an expat already living in Zurich or Basel, that map is friendly: the Zurich studio advertises itself as ten minutes from the main station and bookable at short notice, and just over half of the market you are applying into sits in the same five cantons. For someone relocating to Lausanne, Geneva or Lugano, the map says something else. A quarter of the Swiss market is in places their network does not reach, and no update to their website changes that.

And for anyone still abroad, the map is simply not yet relevant. This is the practical sequence rather than a preference: write and send applications now, from wherever you are, using whatever produces a Swiss-format document; book the studio in the week you arrive, or when you next travel here for an interview. A photo is a one-off purchase that lasts three to five years. It does not have to happen first, and treating it as a blocker is the most common way this decision goes wrong.

What CHF 399 buys and what CHF 15 a month buys

These two prices measure different things. CHF 399 at cvpics.ch buys a dossier written by an HR specialist: a phone call, a choice from fifteen CV templates, a first draft within four working days at the latest. Their page is precise about what she works from — the old CV, all the employer references, LinkedIn entries and the impression formed from emails and the call. What you are paying for is not typing. It is an outside view of your own career.

That is the service no generator provides, and we will not talk it down. Someone reading your Arbeitszeugnisse — the Swiss employer references — for the first time finds evidence in them that you skim past, because for you it was just the job. If you are coming back after a break, changing field, moving up to a leadership role, or four months into a search with no interviews, CHF 399 is not buying prose. It is buying a second opinion, and that is money well spent.

CHF 15 a month buys repeatability instead. The CV is written against one specific advert, which is already in front of us rather than something you have to paste in; the next advert gets its own version, and the version stays attached to the advert instead of becoming another file name. The cost tracks the months of your search, not the number of applications in it. Apply once and the human wins. Apply twenty times and the arithmetic reverses somewhere in the third week.

Our own row, checked rather than remembered

A comparison is only worth as much as the line it writes about itself, so here is ours, read out of the code and off the live site on 4 September 2026. The editor opens with no account: an anonymous request returns a finished Swiss-format document, while the endpoints for saving and for regenerating both refuse an unauthenticated call. The rule sits in the code in almost these words — building and previewing stay free, and only leaving with the file is gated. That gate is tighter than it is usually described: it is not satisfied by a free account, but by access, meaning the trial or the subscription.

The rest of the row: five documents a day and ten per rolling week on the free account, and the same allowance for AI editing instructions; a seven-day free trial; then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable monthly. Export as PDF and as Word, with no watermark on either. Design: two layouts times three fonts times nine accent colours, which is 54 design variations — a multiplication, not a gallery of 54 drawn designs, and the difference matters. cvpics.ch sells seven individually designed templates and offers fifteen when a specialist writes for you. That is more visual variety than we have, and a reader who wants variety should go there.

What is built into ours instead is the part a Word template leaves you to add by hand: the permit line, language levels on the A1–C2 scale rather than the word «fluent», the workload as a Pensum in per cent, and employer references as part of the dossier. Plus the job-search-efforts sheet at /arbeitsbemuehungen, which writes your tracked applications into the official SECO form. One sentence matters more than the form: efforts count only once the office that supervises your claim has received them. We fill in the sheet; we do not replace the filing.

Who should pick which

Go to cvpics.ch when you need a picture. That is the clearest recommendation on this page and it holds regardless of what you write with afterwards. Go there too if you would rather own a file than rent a subscription, if it matters to you that your CV is never uploaded anywhere, or if you are at a turning point where a person should read your references — for one important dossier, a specialist at CHF 399 is a sensible expense.

Use us when you are writing a series, when you are applying in English or across two languages, when each advert deserves its own version rather than one handsome version for all of them, and when you need a filled-in job-search-efforts sheet at the end of the month. And use us now if you are still abroad, because nothing in our side of the table requires you to be in the country.

The likeliest answer is both, in order. One appointment, once, for a portrait that lasts several years. Then a document that changes for every advert, with that portrait sitting in its sidebar. Some comparisons are two vendors fighting over the same franc. This is not one of them.