The pricing difference is a structural choice, not a discount
Disclosure: EZQR publishes this page and sells one of the two products. QR.io figures were read from qr.io/pricing in August 2026 and are quoted rather than estimated. Prices change, so check before buying.
QR.io has made one decision that shapes everything else. It sells a single plan.
$39.99 a month, or $479.50 a year, and you get unlimited dynamic codes, unlimited scans, custom landing pages, scan statistics, API access and bulk creation. Every feature is on from the first day. There is no tier to outgrow and no feature gate to hit halfway through a campaign.
EZQR made the opposite decision. Four tiers, starting free and topping out at $20.
Neither approach is wrong. They serve different buyers, and the honest way to compare them is by volume rather than by headline price.
| EZQR | QR.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes — 3 dynamic codes, unlimited static | No — 7-day trial |
| Entry paid | $5/mo (Lite), 25 dynamic codes | $39.99/mo, unlimited |
| Mid tier | $10/mo (Pro), 100 dynamic codes | No mid tier |
| Top tier | $20/mo (Max), unlimited dynamic | $39.99/mo, unlimited |
| Annual option | Monthly billing on every tier | $479.50/year |
| Scan limits | None on any tier | None |
| API access | Max tier | Included |
| Bulk creation | Max tier | Included |
| Money-back | Cancel any time, monthly | 7-day money-back guarantee |
Work out which side of the line you are on
The whole decision reduces to one number: how many dynamic codes will you have live at once?
Under 25. EZQR Lite at $5/mo. QR.io costs eight times as much for capacity you will not touch. This covers most restaurants, single-location retail, tradespeople and consultants.
25 to 100. EZQR Pro at $10/mo. Still a quarter of QR.io's price. This covers multi-location businesses, small agencies and event organisers running several campaigns at once.
Over 100, or genuinely unpredictable. Now it is EZQR Max at $20/mo against QR.io at $39.99/mo, both unlimited. EZQR is half the price at this point, so the question becomes which product you would rather use rather than which costs less.
You want everything unmetered and never want to think about tiers again. QR.io's flat rate has real appeal, and simplicity is worth money to some teams. Paying once and never checking a usage meter is a legitimate thing to buy.
One caveat about the annual figure. QR.io's $479.50 a year works out at $39.96 a month, so the annual plan is a rounding difference rather than a discount against the monthly rate. If you were expecting the usual 20 percent annual saving, it is not there at that comparison.
Tips
- Count the codes you will have live simultaneously, not the codes you will ever create. Retired campaign codes still occupy a slot on metered plans, so archive them.
- If you are near a tier boundary, price the next tier up rather than the one you fit today. Moving up mid-campaign is easier than discovering the cap on launch day.
What happens to your codes when you stop paying
Every dynamic QR code, from any vendor, is a subscription to a hosted redirect. The printed artwork is permanent and the redirect is rented. So the end of the relationship matters more than the beginning.
Here is EZQR's behaviour, stated precisely, because we can read our own source code.
Cancelling does not switch anything off immediately. You keep everything to the end of the billing period you already paid for. When that period ends, the account drops to the free plan, which allows three dynamic codes. The three oldest dynamic codes stay live and keep redirecting. Every dynamic code beyond those three stops resolving and sends scanners to a page explaining the code is inactive.
Nothing is deleted. Codes, destinations, scan history and short URLs are all retained, and resubscribing turns every paused code back on with the same short URL, so printed material starts working again.
We do not publish a claim about what QR.io does at cancellation, because we have not verified it. Earlier versions of this page did make such claims, sourced from third-party complaint summaries rather than from QR.io, and that was not a good enough standard of evidence for a statement about a named company. Ask them directly, in writing, and keep the answer.
The question to send is short: "If I cancel, do my existing dynamic codes keep redirecting? If only some do, which ones and on what rule?" Any vendor worth printing with will answer it plainly. Our dynamic generator comparison has the full list of five questions worth asking before a print run.
Static codes sidestep the entire issue. The destination is encoded in the pattern, so no subscription, vendor or server is involved after download. If your URL will never change, the permanent code guide explains why static is the safer engineering choice.
Features, and where each tool actually differs
On core QR generation the two products are close, as most tools in this category are. The differences worth knowing sit at the edges.
QR.io bundles API and bulk creation into its single plan. On EZQR both sit on the Max tier at $20/mo. If you need API access or bulk import and nothing else, that is a real difference in how you get there, though Max still lands at half QR.io's monthly price.
EZQR has a permanently free tier. Unlimited static codes with no watermark, plus three dynamic codes with no scan cap and no card required. QR.io's equivalent is a 7-day trial. If you want to test properly against real scanning conditions over a few weeks, that difference matters.
Both offer unlimited scans. Worth calling out because much of this category does not. QR Tiger's free tier stops each code at 500 scans and QR Code Chimp caps free usage at 1,000 scans a month, so a code can die mid-campaign while you are still paying. Neither EZQR nor QR.io does that.
Vector export. EZQR includes SVG and PDF from the Lite tier upward, which is what a print shop actually asks for. Confirm QR.io's export formats against your printer's requirements before committing, and see our SVG page for what to request.
Scan analytics. EZQR gives country-level data on Lite, city-level on Pro and above, with CSV export from Pro. QR.io lists scan statistics on its single plan without publishing the granularity, so ask if location depth matters to you. Our analytics page sets out what we record.
Which to pick
Pick QR.io if you want one price, every feature switched on, no tier maths, and your volume is high enough that $39.99 a month is noise in the budget. It is a coherent product and the single-plan model is a defensible piece of design.
Pick EZQR if your volume is modest, if you want to test on a free tier for longer than a week, or if you would rather pay $5 or $10 than $39.99 for capacity you will not use. We are obviously not neutral here, so treat the recommendation accordingly and check both pricing pages yourself.
Pick neither if your destinations never change. Generate static codes with a free tool, export the vector files, keep them somewhere safe, and pay nobody. A large share of businesses asking this question turn out to be in that category, and the static versus dynamic guide is the fastest way to find out whether you are one of them.
Whatever you choose, get the cancellation answer in writing first. That single email is worth more than any comparison table, including this one.
