Free business cards: what is genuinely free and what is not
Which parts of making, printing and sharing a card cost nothing, where the money starts, and how to tell a free offer from a trial in disguise.
Read it →Cheap business cards are not one thing: you pay for design, paper and finish, the press run, and the quantity you commit to. Two of those can fall to nothing without anybody noticing. The other two show in the hand the moment somebody takes the card.
The four things you are paying for
Knowing which is which is the whole of spending less sensibly.
Design. Someone lays out the card. This can be free and still look bought: the design here costs nothing, the download carries no watermark, and you do not have to buy printing to use it.
Paper and finish. Weight, coating and corners. This is the part a person feels within a second of taking the card, and it is where cutting costs is most obvious.
The press run. Setting up a press has a fixed cost, which is why a hundred cards rarely costs a fifth of what five hundred does.
Quantity. More cards, less per card, and more risk that the batch outlives your details.
Where you can save without it showing
Design. Use a free design that suits your trade rather than paying for a bespoke one you will replace in a year. Fifteen designs exist here across Photo, Plain, Dark, Bold and Business, each with colour sets and lettering pairs, which is enough for almost anybody. Start at the free card maker.
Single sided, with a code. A back face costs more at some printers. If budget is tight, print one face well and put a small code on it rather than a second face badly.
Standard size and standard corners. Square corners and the normal size for your country cost the least and look entirely right. Rounded corners and unusual shapes are a finishing step you pay for.
A sensible quantity. Two hundred and fifty handed out is worth more than a thousand in a drawer.
Where saving shows immediately
Paper under 300 gsm. A thin card bends in a wallet and reads as a photocopy. This is the single worst place to save.
Gloss on a cheap press. It fingerprints and can smear. Matte hides both.
Low resolution artwork. A logo pulled off a website is usually far short of the 300 dots per inch a press wants, and it prints soft. Anything under 200 dots per inch at its printed size is held here rather than printed, because blurry cards help nobody.
No bleed. A card without 3 mm of artwork past the cut line comes back with a white sliver on one edge when the guillotine drifts.
The saving nobody counts
The real cost of a cheap card is reprinting it. A number changes, a title changes, a company changes, and a box of four hundred becomes recycling.
A code on the back removes most of it, as long as the code opens a tracked link you can re-point. Your details move; the ink on four hundred cards does not have to. That is one change to a design that is worth more than every paper saving on this page. The QR code guide sets out how to do it properly.
The free half
The digital half costs nothing to start: one card at your own address, the print files, and the ability to install it on a phone. What that means in practice is that the only money in this exercise is paper and a press. Everything else, the design, the files, the card on the web, the code, is already there. The same goes for looking the part in your line of work: the use cases show a finished card for 25 jobs, free to open in the maker.
The cheapest upgrade on the page
If you spend anything beyond paper, spend it where a cheap card is weakest: being forgotten. Pro is $0.99 a month, less than the cost of reprinting a handful of cards. It lets you send card notifications to everyone who opened your card from the code and saved it, so a new price list or a new number reaches them without a single reprint. The full list of what each plan holds is on the plans page.
A sensible order to spend in
- Free design, free files, free digital card.
- Two hundred and fifty cards on 350 gsm matte, single sided, standard size, code on the face.
- If they work, five hundred double sided with a better finish next time.
That way the first spend is small, the card feels right in the hand, and nothing is wasted if your details change. The cheap cards page and the free cards page go through the two halves in more detail. Step one costs nothing, so make your free card today.
Questions people ask
Are free business cards any good?
A free design can look every bit as good as a bought one, because the quality a person notices comes from the paper you print on. The saving to avoid is paper weight, not design.
How many should I order the first time?
Two hundred and fifty is usually right. It is enough to hand out freely and few enough that a change of details is not painful.
Does thicker paper actually matter?
Yes, and it is the only part of this that a person judges by touch within a second. Somewhere around 350 gsm is the weight to ask for.
Can I get printed cards delivered?
Yes. Printed cards are made to order and sent to every country, with the price and the delivery charge shown on the order page before you pay.