🇺🇸 United States
NTAG216 stickers on Amazon US. Look for sellers with thousands of reviews and explicit "NTAG216" in the listing - not just "NFC tag".
Recommended NFC tags
After seven years of shipping NFC apps and reading thousands of support emails, here’s what we tell people to buy - what works with iPhone, what works with Android, and what to skip.
Disclosure: Some links below are Amazon affiliate links - if you buy through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tags we use ourselves with the NFC.cool apps. No sponsorship, no paid placement.
Just want the short version?
For 95% of use cases - writing your contact card, automation triggers, URL shortcuts, Wi-Fi sharing - buy NTAG216 stickers. Reliable on iPhone, plenty of capacity (888 bytes user-writable), cheap in bulk, and the standard NFC.cool tests against.
Where to buy
🇪🇺 Europe
NTAG216 stickers on Amazon DE - ships across the EU. Same advice: filter by review count and chip name, ignore listings that won't name the chip.
What to look for
Chip: NTAG216
NXP's NTAG216 is the highest-capacity NTAG family chip - 888 bytes of user-writable memory. Works with every iPhone that supports background NFC reading (XR / XS and newer). The chip name should appear in the listing; if a seller won't say what chip is inside, skip.
Form factor: stickers
For most uses, 25 mm (1 inch) round stickers are the sweet spot - they fit on the back of phones, books, keys, mugs, and conference badges. PVC-backed stickers conform to curved surfaces; paper-backed ones are flatter and slightly cheaper.
Quantity
Buy in lots of 25-50. Per-tag price drops fast at higher quantities, and you'll always end up using more than you planned. A pack of 50 NTAG216s typically runs $15-25 in the US, €15-25 in the EU.
Metal compatibility
If you're sticking tags onto metal (laptop lids, cars, appliances), buy on-metal or anti-metal variants. Standard NFC stickers won't read when placed on a conductive surface - the field couples into the metal instead of the chip.
What to avoid
NTAG213
Cheaper, but only 144 bytes of writable space. Fills up fast for anything beyond a short URL. Save yourself the headache and pay 20% more for NTAG216.
Mifare Classic 1K
Common in old hotel cards, transit cards, and "1K NFC tags" bargain bins. They use a different protocol (Mifare, not NDEF) and iPhone cannot write to them at all. Android can read but not always write reliably.
Generic "NFC tags" with no chip name
If the listing photo shows a black sticker and the description just says "NFC tag" with no chip family, expect the worst-quality version of whatever the seller had cheapest that month. Sometimes you'll get NTAG203 (lower capacity, less reliable on iPhone).
"Re-writeable 1000 times" marketing
This is technically true for almost any NTAG chip - they're rated for ~100,000 writes - but it's a tell that the seller is targeting first-time buyers and may have skipped the technical-spec listing. Read the reviews carefully.
Ready to write your first tag?
Open NFC.cool Tools, tap Write, pick a content type (URL, contact card, Wi-Fi, automation), hold a blank tag to the top of your phone, done. The app handles encoding, error correction, and (optionally) permanent locking so the tag can’t be overwritten.
