Three features decide this, and the rest is upsell
Disclosure: EZQR publishes this page and sells one of the products in it. Every competitor price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, and where a vendor publishes no price, this page says so instead of guessing.
Small business owners usually pick a generator the way they pick a coffee shop. Whatever came up first. That works fine until the menu link changes.
Here is the short version of what matters.
Dynamic codes. A static code bakes the destination URL into the black-and-white pattern. Change the destination and the pattern changes, which means every flyer, table tent, window decal and business card you already printed now points somewhere wrong. A dynamic code points at a short redirect you control, so the printed artwork stays valid for the life of the business. That single property is the reason a paid plan exists at all.
Scan data with enough resolution to act on. Not a dashboard with fourteen charts. You need to know which code got scanned, when, and roughly where. If you put a code on a table tent and a code on the door, scan analytics tell you which one people actually use, and you stop paying to print the other one.
Vector export. Ask any print shop. They want SVG, PDF or EPS, because those scale to any size without softening the module edges. A PNG sized for a phone screen and then blown up to A2 is the single most common reason a printed code fails to scan.
What you almost certainly do not need on day one: bulk generation for thousands of codes, API access, white-label domains, team seats, or GS1 supply-chain compliance. A restaurant with twelve tables does not need a supply-chain standard. A real estate agent does not need an API.
What the market actually charges
Every figure here was checked against the vendor's published pricing page in August 2026. Prices move, so confirm before you buy.
| Generator | Free tier | Entry paid tier | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|
| EZQR | 3 dynamic codes, PNG export | $5/mo (Lite): 25 dynamic codes | Monthly |
| QR Code Chimp | 10 dynamic, 1,000 scans/mo | $6.99/mo (Starter) | Billed yearly |
| QR Tiger | 3 dynamic, 500 scans each | $7/mo (Regular): 12 dynamic | Monthly at entry |
| Uniqode | Static codes only | $9/mo (Essential) | Annual only, no monthly option |
| ME-QR | Unlimited, ads on every code | $9.99/mo, or $6.08/mo yearly | Monthly or yearly |
| Bitly | 2 QR codes per month | $10/mo (Core) | Monthly or yearly |
| Flowcode | 2 codes, 500 scans | $25/mo (Pro Plus) | Billed annually |
| QRCode Monkey | Static only, incl. SVG/EPS | No paid tier for static | Free |
Tips
- The entry tiers cluster between $5 and $10. Anyone telling you the category costs hundreds a month is quoting an enterprise tier at you.
- Check the scan cap, not just the code count. QR Tiger's free tier allows 3 codes but stops each at 500 scans, which a busy cafe table tent passes in a month.
- Uniqode adds a custom redirect domain as a $2,000-per-domain-per-year add-on. If branded scan URLs matter to you, price that in before comparing monthly rates.
The reprint is the cost, not the subscription
Run the arithmetic once and the whole decision changes shape.
A twelve-table restaurant printing table tents pays somewhere around $3 to $6 each for decent card stock, so call it $50 for a set. Add a window decal at $25 and a stack of 500 takeaway flyers at roughly $60. That is $135 of printed material carrying one URL.
Now the menu moves to a new page. With static codes, all $135 becomes recycling, plus the two hours of your Saturday spent reprinting and replacing. With dynamic codes you edit one field and the existing print keeps working.
The subscription that prevents that costs $60 a year at the entry tier.
So the honest framing is not "is $5 a month worth it." It is "will any destination I am about to print ever change." One reprint cycle pays for two years of any plan in the table above. Two reprint cycles pay for the enterprise tier you do not need.
This is also why the gap between vendors barely matters. Choosing EZQR over Uniqode saves $48 a year at entry. Choosing dynamic over static saves a reprint. The second decision is worth roughly three times the first, and almost everyone spends their research time on the first one.
One caveat worth stating, because it cuts the other way. If your destination genuinely never changes, the subscription is pure cost and static codes from a free tool are the correct answer. Businesses that print a code pointing at their homepage, and keep that homepage for a decade, should not be paying anyone.
The annual-billing question matters more than the price
Look at that table again and notice how narrow the price band is. Five dollars to ten dollars covers most of the market. The difference between the top and bottom of that range, over a year, is around sixty dollars. One reprint run of table tents costs more than that.
So stop optimising the monthly number. Optimise the exit.
Uniqode states plainly in its own FAQ that it offers annual subscription plans only, and that it does not offer monthly plans. QR Tiger publishes its Advanced tier at $16/mo and Premium at $37/mo billed annually, so the headline rate assumes a year up front. Flowcode's Pro Plus sits at $25/mo billed annually, and its Growth tier carries no public price at all.
Annual billing is not a scam. For a business that already knows its volume, paying yearly is usually the better value, and vendors discount it for a reason. The problem is specific to businesses that have not yet learned what they need, which is most of them in the first quarter of using QR codes at all.
Here is the pattern that costs people money. You sign up in month one, print everything in month two, discover in month three that you are using four codes rather than the forty you planned for, and then sit on a tier you have outgrown in the wrong direction for another nine months.
Month-to-month for the first quarter. Then commit. EZQR bills monthly at every tier, which is the reason it appears in this section rather than the price section.
Free tiers are where the real differences hide
Paid tiers across this category look remarkably similar. Free tiers do not, and if you are testing before you spend, the differences are worth knowing.
QRCode Monkey is the outlier and deserves credit for it. Static codes, no account required, no watermark, and it exports SVG, PDF and EPS at no cost. For a business that only ever needs one code pointing at one URL that will never change, it is genuinely the right answer, and it beats EZQR's own free tier on vector export. We cover the trade-off in full in the QRCode Monkey comparison.
ME-QR offers unlimited free codes, and its pricing page states that all free-tier codes carry advertising. One ads-free code comes with Lite. Everything ads-free requires Premium. Advertising on a code you printed on your own storefront is a strange look, so read that row carefully.
Flowcode caps free at 2 codes and 500 scans. Bitly allows 2 QR codes per month on its free plan. QR Tiger gives 3 dynamic codes limited to 500 scans each. EZQR gives 3 dynamic codes with PNG export and no scan cap, which we walk through honestly, limitations included, in the free plan walkthrough.
A free dynamic code with a 500-scan ceiling is a trial, not a plan. Once the code stops resolving, every printed copy of it is dead paper. That failure mode is common enough that we wrote a whole post on why a QR code stops working and what to check first.
Pick by what you are printing
Generic advice is useless here, because the right tier depends almost entirely on how many distinct destinations you need and how permanent the printing is.
Restaurant or cafe. You need one menu code that survives menu changes, and probably one review code on the receipt. Two dynamic codes, updated seasonally. Any entry tier covers this comfortably. The thing to get right is not the plan, it is the vector export, because table tents get printed properly and a soft PNG will haunt you.
Retail shop. Window decal, counter card, maybe a code per product category. Call it five to fifteen codes. You want per-code scan data, because the window decal and the counter card perform very differently and only the data will tell you which. This is where a $5 to $7 tier with real tracking earns itself back.
Services and trades. One code on the van, one on the business card, one on the invoice. Three codes, changed almost never. Honestly, evaluate whether you need to pay at all. If the destinations are permanent, static codes from a free tool do the job, and permanent code options are worth reading before you subscribe to anything.
Events and markets. Volume is spiky. You want twenty codes for a weekend and three the rest of the year. Monthly billing matters more here than anywhere else, because an annual contract sized for your busiest month is dead money for eleven of them.
Agency or multi-location. Now the enterprise features start earning their price: team seats, custom domains, bulk import. That is a genuinely different buying decision, and the full cost breakdown covers the tiers above this one.
The fifteen-minute test before you spend anything
Run this before entering a card number. It takes about fifteen minutes and catches most of the expensive mistakes.
Create one code on the free tier. Point it at your real destination, not a test page. Scan it with two different phones, one iPhone and one Android, from about a metre away in the actual lighting where it will live. Storefront window glare defeats more codes than bad generators do.
Now export it as SVG or PDF and open the file. If the generator only offers PNG at the tier you are considering, and you intend to print anything larger than a business card, stop there and pick something else. Our SVG export page explains what the print shop is actually asking for.
Change the destination and rescan. This is the one people skip. Confirm with your own eyes that the printed pattern still resolves after you edit the target, because that is the entire feature you are paying for.
Then find the cancellation path in the account settings before you subscribe. If cancelling requires emailing support, factor that in. And check what happens to your codes when you stop paying, because on most dynamic platforms, including this one, the redirect stops resolving when the subscription ends. That is standard across the category, not a trap, but it is the fact that should determine whether you use dynamic codes for something permanent like a headstone or a building plaque. For those, use static.
When to upgrade, and when not to
Upgrade when you hit an actual wall, not when a feature list looks appealing.
The real triggers are specific. You run out of dynamic codes. You need scan data older than 30 days to compare this quarter against last. You need city-level location rather than country. You need two people in the account. On EZQR those map to Lite at $5, Pro at $10 for full analytics retention and city-level geography, and Max at $20 for team seats, API access and a custom domain. The plan comparison lays out which wall you are actually hitting.
Do not upgrade for A/B testing until you have a code getting enough weekly scans for the result to mean anything. Do not upgrade for bulk import until you are creating codes in batches of twenty or more. Do not upgrade for white-label until a client has asked.
One last thing worth saying plainly, since we sell one of these. If your destinations never change, you do not need a subscription from anyone. Generate static codes free, export them as vector, and keep the files. The dynamic versus static guide walks through how to tell which case you are in, and a fair number of small businesses turn out to be in the static one.
