Do You Need the NFC Card, or Just the QR?

An NFC business card is a card with a chip in it that opens your contact profile when somebody taps it to a phone. It works, it is quick, and it looks good across a table.

The part most sellers skip is the one that decides whether you need it. The chip does not hold your details. It holds a link.

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NFC is a contactless radio standard. Thirteen point five six MHz, over a range of a few centimetres. Tap a card to a phone and the phone's browser loads a page.

What sits on the chip is an NDEF record, and in practice that is one short web address. A common business card chip, the NTAG213, holds about a hundred and thirty characters. Enough for a link, and close to nothing else.

So your name and your number and your links live on a hosted page somewhere else. The card points at it.

Which means two products share one name, and separating them is the whole decision. The chip is hardware you buy. The profile is software it points to. A QR code, or a plain link in a message, reaches that same profile with no chip involved.

The plastic is the optional half.

What the chip buys you is speed. Vendors put a tap at under a second against roughly three to five seconds for a QR scan. That figure is theirs rather than ours, so take it as a vendor claim, but it is directionally right. A tap is faster, and it makes a better moment.

What it costs you is reach. An iPhone reads NFC in the background only from the iPhone XS onward, which means iOS twelve, in twenty eighteen. Older iPhones want an app open first. Some budget Android handsets carry no NFC hardware at all. A QR code reaches every phone with a camera, which is the whole room.

Then the part that sounds like an accounting detail and is not one. Most NFC card platforms bundle a monthly fee with the card. Stop paying, and a chip that points at a hosted address can go quiet, because the page it points at has gone. The chip is fine. The destination is the problem, and we have a whole episode on that failure with printed QR codes, because it is the same failure.

The opposite arrangement fails the opposite way. Write a full contact file onto the chip rather than a link, and it keeps working with no account behind it at all. It also cannot be changed afterward. New number, new box of cards.

So the order I would put these in.

Own the profile first. Get a hosted card at an address you control, with a QR that reaches the whole room, and find out in writing what happens to that page if you stop paying whoever hosts it.

Then, if you want the tap, buy the chip and point it at the profile you already own.

We build the card half of this and we do not sell the chips, so take that as the bias it is. It is also why we ended up giving the file and the QR away: for most people those cover the job, and we would rather be honest about that than sell somebody plastic they will use twice.

Doing it the other way round is how somebody ends up with a hundred metal cards pointing at a page that belongs to a company they no longer pay.

I am Ankur, and I built Whooshly. Digital cards, QR codes and short links you pay for once instead of by the month. If you want the card you handed someone to still open next year, we are at whooshly.co.