Digital business card in Switzerland: what to check before you choose

Languages, where the data sits, the address, the contact file, the price, the app: six checks for a digital business card in Switzerland, and where Vizy stands.

Why "in Switzerland" changes the question

A digital business card is the same object everywhere: a page with your details, opened from a link or a QR code. What changes in Switzerland is who opens it.

Several languages in one country. A carpenter in Fribourg has clients who read French and clients who read German. A consultant in Lugano works with Zurich. A card whose buttons speak one language only tells part of your contacts that it was not made for them.

Clients who ask where the data sits. With the Swiss data protection act, the question has become an ordinary one, and freelancers hear it as well as banks do. Being able to answer in one sentence is worth more than a long policy.

Numbers in +41. A number written 079 works until the client is abroad, or until the contact is saved by someone with a foreign SIM card. The card should carry the international format, and so should the contact it saves.

Paper still changes hands. At a trade fair, at the notary's, on a building site, a paper card is still what people hold out. The digital card does not replace it: it sits on the back, as a QR code.

Six things to check

1. Which language does the card speak to the visitor? Not the language of your text, which is yours, but that of the buttons and labels. Check whether they follow the visitor's phone or stay fixed in one language.
2. Where is the data, and is the visitor tracked? Look for the country of the server and the name of the host in the privacy policy, not on the home page. Then open one of the service's cards in a private window: a cookie banner usually means that something is measuring the people who scan you.
3. Is the address short and readable? You will dictate it on the phone and print it on paper. An address with your name in it passes; a string of random characters does not.
4. Does "Add to contacts" produce a real contact file? The button should save a vCard into the phone's own address book, with the photo, without asking the visitor to create an account. Test it on an iPhone and on an Android phone.
5. What does "free" mean? A trial, a limited tier, or everything open: the four models are described here. Ask what happens to a printed QR code on the day you stop paying.
6. Is an app needed, on either side? If the person opposite has to install something to receive your number, they will not.

Where Vizy stands on each point

Languages. The interface exists in French, German, Italian and English. The buttons on a card follow the language of the phone that opens it. Your own text stays as you wrote it: nothing of yours is translated.

Data. Everything is hosted on a single server in Germany, at Hetzner. That is not Switzerland, and if your clients require Swiss hosting, the answer is no. There are no analytics tools, no advertising and no visitor tracking. You see how many times your card was opened and how many times it was saved, not by whom. A switch takes the card out of search engines, and you can delete the account and the card yourself at any time.

Address. vizy.me/your-name, which can be read aloud and printed.

Contact file. The "Add to contacts" button saves a vCard, photo included, into the visitor's phone.

Price. Free, all of it, with no credit card and no trial. No paid plan is planned. If the service ever grew to the point where hosting had to be paid for, a contribution would be around one franc a month.

App. None, for you or for the visitor. It runs in the browser.

The card itself holds a photo, your contact details, your links and social profiles, in one of five themes, each in light and dark, with a QR code as SVG and PNG.

What Vizy does not do

No team management: every card belongs to one person, and nobody administers thirty of them from one screen. No custom domain: the address is on vizy.me. No detailed statistics per link: you see how often your card was opened and saved and how visitors arrived, not which link they clicked.

On NFC, the answer is partial. Vizy sells no NFC cards. The address of your card can be written to any NFC chip with a free app, and the comparison of NFC and QR codes says when that is worth doing.

So look elsewhere if you are equipping a company with uniform cards, if the card has to live under your own domain, if you need to know which link gets clicked, or if a contract requires the data to stay in Switzerland. Put the six questions above to the other services. We cannot answer for them, and offers change: read their current pages.

Vizy is made by a small team for Swiss freelancers, and it is sized for that: one person, one card.

How to try it in ten minutes

1. Open Vizy and create an account. Choose your address first: it is what you will print.
2. Add a photo, your name, your role, and your number in +41 format.
3. Add the links that matter: website, booking page, one or two social profiles. Fewer is better.
4. Pick a theme and look at the card in light and in dark.
5. Open your address on your own phone and press "Add to contacts". Check the name, the number and the photo in your address book.
6. Download the QR code and scan it from the screen. If it will go on paper, the guide to a QR code on a business card covers size and placement.

If the result does not suit you, delete the account. The card goes with it.