No Bullshit QR Codes

Free QR codes that encode your real URL. No account, no trial, no hostage links.

A friend's posters stopped working

A friend of mine works for a small not-for-profit co-op here in town. She designed a run of posters and sent them to the printer. She put them up around the community. Each poster had a QR code in the corner so people could reach the co-op's page.

A week later the codes were dead. Every scan hit a "this link has expired" page that demanded payment. She hadn't changed anything. The QR generator she used offered a week-long free trial. When the trial ended, the site stopped redirecting the short URLs baked into her codes. The posters were already printed and hung. The only way to fix them was to pay up.

That's not a bug. That's the business model.

Why this is a scam

This is what made me angry once I understood it. A QR code is just an image that encodes some text, usually a URL. Generating one costs almost nothing. It's a bit of math that turns a string into a grid of black and white squares. There's no ongoing service to pay for.

So how do you charge rent for something free? You stop encoding the destination directly. These services don't put the co-op's real URL into the code. They route it through a short link they own, something like theirdomain.com/x7Fq2. Now the printed code points at their server forever. They control whether that redirect keeps working. Miss a payment and they flip a switch. Every poster, sticker, and business card you printed goes dark.

URL redirection is one of the cheapest services on the internet to run. Hide it inside a QR code. Hold printed material hostage over it. That feels like a scam, especially when the only thing they built on top is an image generator.

The other annoyances

While I was at it, I fixed two smaller frustrations:

• Sign-up walls. Many generators make you create an account before you can download the thing you already made. For a five-second task, that's absurd.
• Bad exports. Plenty of sites only give you a small, fixed-size PNG. For a printer you want a crisp SVG. For a raster you want to pick the size, not fight a 200×200 JPEG.

What I built

So I built qr.jpeckham.com: a no-bullshit QR code generator.

• Paste a URL, get a QR code instantly. No account, no trial, no email.
• Shortening is optional, and it never breaks your code. If you turn it on, it shortens via the Spoo.me API. If shortening fails for any reason, the QR encodes your full, normalized URL instead. The code never points at a link I can turn off. Worst case, it points straight at your destination, the way a QR code should.
• Real exports. Download as SVG for print, or as PNG at the size you want, with an optional transparent background.

The point is simple. A printed QR code should keep working forever because it encodes your destination, not a lease on someone else's redirect.

How it works

It's a small Next.js app deployed on Vercel. QR generation runs client-side with qrcode.react, so the code is drawn in your browser as soon as you type a URL. The only backend is a single /api/shorten route. That route normalizes the URL, optionally calls Spoo.me, and falls back to the long URL if anything goes wrong. It's rate-limited and size-capped. It works fine with no API key at all; it just skips shortening. The whole thing is open source on GitHub.

The takeaway

Your printed QR codes should never depend on someone else's subscription. If a generator routes your code through a link it controls, the code lasts only as long as your relationship with that company. Encode the real destination. Keep an SVG. Never let a lapsed trial take down a wall full of posters again.