What a QR code costs over three years, and which part is not the subscription

Pricing pages in this category invite you to compare monthly fees, which is the least interesting number in the decision. A printed campaign has a cost structure that ordinary software does not: the expensive part already happened at the printer, and it happens again from the beginning if anything goes wrong afterwards.

Work it in the order the money actually moves. Design and print is one payment, made once, and for a few thousand flyers or a handful of large format pieces it is comfortably the largest line in the budget. The subscription is small and recurring. Over three years a ten euro plan comes to three hundred and sixty euro, which is real money, and is still usually less than a single reprint of anything physical at scale.

So the number that decides the comparison is not the fee. It is the chance that you reprint, multiplied by what the reprint costs. Everything that makes a code stop resolving lives inside that term, and none of it appears in the price column.

Three things stop a dynamic code resolving, and all three are contractual rather than technical. A subscription lapses and the vendor stops answering the redirect. A trial ends and the codes created during it are deactivated. A scan cap is reached and codes pause until the next billing period. Each is a policy somebody wrote down, which means each one can be read before you print rather than discovered afterwards.

Two of them are documented by the vendors themselves. QR Code Generator, branded QRCG by Bitly, deactivates dynamic codes created during its fourteen day trial when the trial ends. QR Tiger stops resolving dynamic codes while a subscription is lapsed, although it keeps them in the account so they can be reactivated. Neither policy is buried. Both are easy to miss while comparing monthly prices in a table, because a table has no column for what happens after you leave.

You will notice this page does not put competitor prices in a table of its own. That is deliberate, and it is not modesty. Advertised prices here are frequently annual amounts presented as a monthly figure, or introductory prices, and they change often enough that a table published today is wrong within a quarter. A price we quote and cannot keep current is worse than no price at all, because a stale number reads as a current one. What changes far more slowly is the policy on what happens when you stop paying, and that is the thing actually worth comparing.

The per-vendor version of the first two, with the sources attached, is at /blog/alternative/qr-code-generator.

Ours, for the record and so you can hold us to it. The free plan is a usable product rather than a trial: twenty new codes a day, no cap on how many you keep, unlimited scans on every code, thirty days of scan history, and no card. Pro is ten euro a month, billed monthly, and it removes the daily creation limit and keeps the complete scan history instead of a thirty day window. Cancelling returns the account to free. Codes printed while paying keep resolving after you stop.

That last sentence is the one to compare, so here is what it costs us to mean it. A code that keeps resolving forever is a redirect we keep answering forever, for an account that may never pay again. That is a real and permanent expense, and it is the reason most of this category does the opposite. We think it is the correct trade because the alternative is a product whose failure mode lands in public, on paper, in somebody's customer's hands.

Those numbers live at /pricing, and they are read from the same constants the checkout uses, so the page cannot quietly disagree with the charge.

Three questions to put to any vendor before a print run, in writing, including to us. What happens to an existing dynamic code the day a subscription ends. Whether codes created during a trial survive that trial. Whether there is a scan limit, and what happens when a campaign reaches it. An answer that takes more than one sentence is itself an answer.

Finally, the case against paying anybody. If the destination will never change and you do not need to count scans, a static code encodes that destination directly, costs nothing, depends on no service, and cannot be switched off by a billing event. It is the right choice more often than this industry finds it convenient to say. Dynamic codes earn their fee when you need to repoint printed material, correct a URL after it is on paper, or find out which surface produced the scans. If none of those apply to your campaign, the cheapest three year cost in this whole comparison is zero.