A simple and low cost stylus profiler made of ferrite cores is developed. The devised profiler consists of a contact probe, a measuring transducer, a signal processing unit, and a motorized stage. The contact probe attached to 4-bar spring maintains sufficient stiffness to protect disturbances. An overlap-area type inductive position sensing system is selected as a measuring transducer, which has high sensitivity, repeatability and linearity. The transducer is composed of coil bundles and ferrite cores which have good electromagnetic characteristics in spite of low cost. The repeatability of the profiler with the proposed inductive sensing system is better than 50nm. Experimental results are shown that the proposed profiler can measure the line or 3D profile of an object with sub-micron features.