After several years of shipping NFC apps and reading thousands of support emails, here’s what I tell people to buy - what works with iPhone, what works with Android, and what to skip.
For 95% of what people do with NFC - contact cards, automation triggers, URL shortcuts, Wi-Fi sharing - buy NTAG216 stickers. Reliable on iPhone and Android, 888 bytes of writable space, cheap in bulk, and the exact chip NFC.cool tests against. New to NFC tags? My complete beginner’s guide to NFC tags explains how they work and how the chips differ. Pick your Amazon store - or just click any, and Amazon routes international shoppers to their nearest store automatically.
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Amiibo are NTAG215 chips specifically. If you’re backing up Amiibo with NFC.cool, buy blank NTAG215 tags - not the NTAG216 I recommend for everything else. It’s the one case where you match the chip exactly: NFC.cool writes the re-keyed copy to an NTAG215, the same chip type a real Amiibo uses.
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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.
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. Card-format tags are the most reliable, though: a credit-card-sized tag has a much larger antenna coil than a small sticker, so it couples with a phone more easily.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
