Free vCard QR code API — contact QR codes from a URL, no key

Point a phone camera at the right QR code and it offers to save the contact — name, number, email, company, straight into the address book, no typing. Business cards, email signatures, conference badges, "contact the office" posters, staff directory pages: same trick everywhere. Generator websites make these one at a time; if you're rendering a badge for every attendee or a card for every employee from a template, you want an API.

Mockbird's QR endpoint has dedicated contact parameters — you pass the fields, the server builds the vCard:

The 10-second version

<img src="https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/qr?name=Jane+Doe&phone=%2B15551234567&email=jane%40example.com" width="256">

# or download it
curl -o contact.png "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/qr/400?name=Jane+Doe&phone=%2B15551234567&email=jane%40example.com"

Scan that with any modern phone camera and it prompts to add Jane Doe to contacts. No key, no signup, no watermark — and the same URL returns the same bytes forever, so it's safe to cache, print, and re-render in build pipelines.

Why a dedicated contact mode (the escaping problem)

Contact QR codes encode a vCard — a plain-text format phone cameras recognize:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Doe;Jane;;;
FN:Jane Doe
TEL;TYPE=CELL:+15551234567
EMAIL:jane@example.com
END:VCARD

Simple — until you hand-build it. The format has rules that are easy to miss: values must escape ; , \ and newlines (RFC 2426), lines are CRLF-separated, N: wants Family;Given order while FN: wants the display name, and FN is required in vCard 3.0 — omit it and some readers show an empty contact. Then the whole multi-line string must be URL-encoded to survive a query string. Even QuickChart's own vCard documentation example writes N: twice where the second line should be FN: — that's how easy this is to get wrong. With ?name= + ?phone= you skip all of it — standard URL encoding of your values is all that's left, and the server handles the payload layer:

# company name is `Smith, Jones & Co; Ltd` — no payload escaping on your side, just URL encoding
…/qr?name=Alex+Smith&org=Smith%2C+Jones+%26+Co%3B+Ltd

# raw ?data= still works if you'd rather build the vCard yourself
…/qr?data=BEGIN%3AVCARD%0D%0AVERSION%3A3.0%0D%0AN%3ADoe%3BJane%3B%3B%3B%0D%0AFN%3AJane%20Doe%0D%0AEND%3AVCARD

Those two paths return byte-identical images for the same vCard — the contact params are sugar over the same encoder, not a different code path.

All the parameters

Why vCard 3.0 and not MECARD or vCard 4.0? vCard 3.0 is the one both iOS and Android camera apps parse natively and completely; MECARD is terser but supports fewer fields, and 4.0 still trips up some readers. If you specifically want MECARD, build it in ?data= — the encoder doesn't care.

Recipes

# full business card
…/qr?name=Ada+Lovelace&title=Chief+Engineer&org=Analytical+Engines&phone=%2B442079460958&email=ada%40example.com&url=https%3A%2F%2Fada.example

# print-quality badge: bigger, high error correction (survives lanyard scuffing)
…/qr/800?name=Jane+Doe&phone=%2B15551234567&ecc=H

# crisp vector for a PDF card
…/qr.svg?name=Jane+Doe&email=jane%40example.com

# email-signature sized, brand colors
…/qr/120?name=Jane+Doe&phone=%2B15551234567&fg=003366

A badge for every row of a staff list is a shell loop:

> while IFS=, read -r name phone email; do
    curl -s -G -o "badge-${name// /-}.png" \
      "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/qr/400" \
      --data-urlencode "name=$name" --data-urlencode "phone=$phone" \
      --data-urlencode "email=$email" --data-urlencode "ecc=Q"
  done < staff.csv

curl -G --data-urlencode is the easy way to get the URL encoding right from a shell — it handles the +, spaces and @ for you.

Contact details are in the URL — a note on logging

A contact QR code's purpose is to hand out the details printed next to it, so the scan-side privacy story is simple. But the URL contains the phone number and email too: it sits in browser history, shell history, and proxy logs. Mockbird redacts phone=, email= and address= (and hand-built vCard payloads in ?data=) from its own request inspector — on every project, because the shared demo project's inspector is public. For a card you'd rather not have in living URLs at all, generate the image once with curl -o and keep the file.

Honest comparison

Being upfront: QuickChart documents the vCard format itself, supports logo embedding and styled dots we don't, and their Google Sheets add-on is genuinely handy for one-off batches — if you want a branded code, use it. goqr.me has run a reliable free QR endpoint for over a decade and can also decode codes. Mockbird's angle is the API case: fields in, image out, escaping handled, deterministic output — and the endpoint lives next to a full mock REST API, Wi-Fi QR codes, placeholder images, avatars, OG cards and charts under one project URL.

Limits

• Field caps: name ≤64, phone ≤32, email ≤64, org ≤64, title ≤64, url ≤200, address ≤128 chars — a full card still encodes comfortably at ?ecc=H.
• PNG capped at 1,000,000 pixels (1000×1000); ?format=svg beyond that.
• Counts toward the project's daily request cap (the shared demo project has a generous one; your own project gets its own).

Full reference in the docs. More image guides: QR code API · Wi-Fi QR code API · placeholder image API · OG image API · chart image API · avatar API · identicon API. Create your API →