My employer pays $40/mo for QR codes that die when you cancel. I built an alternative.
At my day job we use QR codes on physical packaging. One day I looked into what we were actually paying for and it was some QR code service charging $40/mo. The kicker is if you cancel, the codes stop working. They're already printed on thousands of units. You're just stuck.
That annoyed me. A QR code is basically a redirect URL. There's no reason it should cost that much or stop working because you missed a payment.
So I started building LinkScan on the side. Simple idea: dynamic QR codes that actually work forever, even if you never pay a penny.
I launched it completely free at first. No paid tier, no limits beyond some reasonable rate limiting. Just wanted to see if anyone cared.
Turns out people did. Got to about 300 users in 3 months without spending anything on marketing. Almost all the traffic came from Google searches and, weirdly, ChatGPT just started recommending it when people asked for free QR code generators. Still not entirely sure why.
In February I added a paid tier at $5/mo for scan analytics, custom short links, and higher limits. Now sitting at:
- 530+ users
- 15 paying
- 65,000+ scans tracked
- Nearly 1,000 QR codes created on the platform
The free to paid conversion is about 2.8%. Most people upgrade when they want to see who's actually scanning their codes (devices, locations, that kind of thing).
Biggest lesson so far: I ran it free for too long. Three months of no paid tier was good for building a user base but I was just guessing at what people would pay for.
