Getting your cards printed

The short version: download the PDF, upload it to any online printer, choose 350gsm matt, and order roughly as many as you expect to ship. It costs somewhere between two and six pence a card and takes a few days to arrive. That is the whole job for most people.

The rest of this page is for everyone whose situation is not that — and for anyone wondering whether to print them at home, which we would gently talk you out of.

What Monact actually gives you

One PDF, ready for a printer. It is not a picture of a card — it is the artwork, drawn to the specification a print shop expects:

• 85 x 55mm finished size. The standard business card in the UK and Europe.
• 3mm bleed on all four sides. Background colour runs past the cut line so a slight drift in the guillotine cannot leave a white sliver on the edge.
• Crop marks outside the bleed, showing the trimmer where the card ends.
• Vector at any size. The QR code is drawn as shapes rather than pixels, so it is exactly as sharp at any scale.

That is the same thing a designer would hand over, which means you can walk into any print shop with it and they will know what to do. You do not need to explain Monact to them.

Route one: an online printer

This is what most sellers do and it is the least trouble. Upload the PDF to any of the large online printers, pick your quantity, and they arrive in a few days.

Ask for 350gsm, matt or silk. Prices move around and depend where you are, but as a rough guide a few hundred cards costs in the region of fifteen to twenty pounds or dollars, and a thousand lands somewhere around forty to fifty. Per card that is small enough that it stops being the thing you are optimising.

One thing to watch if you are ordering in the United States: an American business card is 3.5 x 2 inches, and ours is 85 x 55mm. They are close but not the same. Choose a custom size or tell the printer the finished size, or you risk them trimming to the American dimensions and cutting into the design.

Route two: let your supplier do it

If a manufacturer makes your product or a fulfilment partner packs it, this is usually the better answer and the one people forget. Send them the PDF and ask them to print the insert and put one in each box.

It removes the whole errand. No delivery to receive, no box of cards in the spare room, and nobody has to remember to put one in on a busy day — it becomes part of packing, which is already a process that happens without you.

Route three: printing them yourself

Worth doing once, to hold the thing and check the code scans. Not worth doing for the cards that actually go in boxes, and it is worth being clear about why.

A home printer cannot take real card. Most laser printers stop somewhere between 160 and 230gsm, and it is a physical limit rather than a setting: a laser fuses toner with a heated roller, the sheet has to bend around it, and 350gsm will not bend. Inkjets have no such roller and manage heavier stock, though they feed it unreliably.

So printing at home means printing on paper. Not card — paper, or at best something thin enough to flex when it is picked up. That matters more than it sounds, because the insert is the first thing your buyer touches after the product itself, and a limp card reads as a corner cut. Somebody who has just opened something they were pleased with notices.

There is a second problem underneath the first. A QR code needs a margin of clear white around it, and a cut that strays into that margin stops it scanning. Trimming a sheet by hand, over dozens of edges, is exactly the job that produces a few cards that quietly do not work — and you find out from the buyer, or never.

And one specific trap, if you do print one to check. The PDF is a single card on a small page. It is tempting to use your print dialog’s “multiple pages per sheet” option to fit several on, but that shrinks the page to make them fit, and it shrinks the code with it. Below about 2cm across, a code stops being reliable in the light people actually open parcels in. Print it at full size, or measure the code on the page before you trust it.

The thing that takes the risk out of ordering

The usual fear with printing anything is committing. You order a thousand, then change your mind about what you wanted to ask, and now you have a thousand wrong cards.

That cannot happen here, and it is deliberate. The code on the card points at Monact, not at a survey. What that code does — which questions it asks, whether it asks anything at all or sends people straight to a review page — is a setting you change from the dashboard, and it takes effect on cards that are already in boxes on the other side of the world.

So over-order. Leftover cards are not waste, they are stock. And if you stop paying, the codes still resolve — nobody scanning your card ever meets an error page.

What your customer needs

Nothing. No app, no account, no typing. Every iPhone since 2017 and every mainstream Android phone since 2018 reads a QR code straight from the camera app — they point it at the card and tap the link that appears. It is why the card carries a code rather than a web address for someone to type in.

A short checklist

• Download the PDF from the QR Code page of your campaign.
• 350gsm, matt or silk. Not high gloss — it glares under a phone.
• Finished size 85 x 55mm. Say so explicitly if you are ordering in the US.
• Order for the units you expect to ship, and round up.
• When they arrive, scan one with your own phone before they go anywhere near a box.

That last one takes ten seconds and is the only quality check that matters.

Questions