QR code business cards, and which kind you want.

Yes, if it opens something worth opening. A code that saves your contact in one tap beats asking someone to type your email. Print it at 20mm or larger, dark on light, and test it in a dim room before you order. Point it at a page you can edit, so a new number never means a reprint.

Two ways, and they are not the same thing. You can encode your contact details directly into the code as a vCard, which our free generator does with no signup, or you can point the code at a card page that you can edit afterwards. Encode the details if nothing will ever change; point at a page if anything might.

Yes, both kinds. Our vCard QR generator is free with no account and no watermark, and a Cardr card with a permanent QR is free forever with no card details taken. Be careful with generators that make you sign up: some of those produce a code that redirects through their service and stops working when a trial ends, which turns a printed card into a dead one.

A vCard QR cannot expire, because the details are inside the code and nothing is contacted when it is scanned. A link-based code depends on whoever runs the link. Cardr codes point at cardr.co/yourname and do not expire, and there is no scan limit on any plan including the free one. The codes that do expire are the ones from services that put a redirect in the middle, which is worth checking before you print two thousand of anything.

Almost always because it is too dense. Every character you encode adds modules to the grid, so a full vCard with an address and three social profiles produces a code with tiny squares that a phone camera cannot resolve in poor light or at an angle. That is the case for a short link over an encoded record, and it is the single most common reason these fail in the field.

Twenty millimetres square is a sensible floor for a sparse code, and a dense one needs considerably more. Leave a clear quiet zone around it, print it dark on light rather than the other way round, and never place it over a photograph. If you have to shrink it below 20mm, shorten what it encodes rather than the code itself.

Yes, on any iPhone since iOS 11 and on essentially every current Android phone. The camera app reads QR codes natively, so there is nothing to install. This is why a QR code beats NFC for reach: an NFC tag needs the phone held in a specific place, and a QR code needs a camera pointed roughly at it. Bitly’s own data says scanning is still growing, and that figure, with its source and its caveats, is on our page of business card statistics, with the sources checked.

For most people, yes, which is why Cardr’s own metal cards carry a QR rather than a chip. A QR code can be printed on anything, costs nothing, works at a distance and across a table, and cannot be left at home. NFC is a better object and a better moment. Our NFC page goes through where each one actually wins.