CardLinks is a free card maker for every occasion: birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, thank-yous, apologies and more. You pick a design, fill in a short form, and get a link; the person you send it to opens an envelope in their browser and the card opens with your photo and message. A birthday card can instead open on a 3D cake: they blow at their phone and watch the candles go out one by one. There is no app to install, no account to create, and nothing to pay. Every card is deleted seven days after it is made. If you want, you can pay ₹79 to choose the card's link yourself; that card shows no ads and stays up for a year.
Around the card there is a small library of writing help: ready-to-send templates that open in the creator with the message filled in, and guides on what to write for a sister, a parent, a best friend, or someone whose birthday you missed. The guides exist because the hardest part of a card is not the design; it is the three sentences in the middle.
Most digital birthday cards are a picture of a card. The idea here was a card that responds to the person holding the phone. Blowing out candles is the one birthday ritual almost everyone shares, so the card asks for the microphone, listens for the sound of breath, and puts the flames out in response. The audio is analysed in the browser only. It is never recorded, stored, or sent to a server, and if the person declines the permission they can put the candles out by tapping instead.
The site is built and maintained by Parth Jariwala, a software developer. It started as a card for a family birthday and turned into something worth sharing. There is no company behind it and no team; it is one person's side project, which is why the site is small and why bugs get fixed at evening speed rather than enterprise speed.
The front end is a Next.js application served from Cloudflare's edge network. The cake is rendered with Three.js, and the blow detection uses the browser's audio API to measure sudden bursts of low-frequency noise, which is what breath sounds like to a microphone. A small backend API stores each card and its photo for seven days and then deletes them. Cards are private links: they are not listed anywhere and search engines are told not to index them.
The animated stickers on some designs are Noto Animated Emoji by Google, used under the CC BY 4.0 licence.
As little as possible. Card text and photos live for seven days. If IP-based limits are on, your IP address is kept for the same seven days to cap how many cards one connection can create, then deleted. Analytics are limited to page-level usage and respect your consent choice in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland. The full detail is in the privacy policy, and the rules for using the site are in the terms of use.
Found a bug, want a card taken down early, or have a question? The contact page has the details. Feedback about the guides is welcome too; they are written by hand and revised when people point out what is missing.
The site is made and paid for by one person. If a card made someone's day, you can buy me a chai, from ₹25. It is a tip, not a purchase: nothing changes on the site either way.
Buy me a chai
CardLinks is free and made by one person. A chai helps keep it that way.
UPI or an Indian card, via Razorpay. A tip buys nothing and can’t be refunded.