Free QR code generator

What "free" covers here, and where it stops

Free means no account, no email field, no trial clock, and no cap. Type a link, download the file, close the tab, come back tomorrow and do it another forty times. Nothing is metered because nothing is counted: the encoder runs inside the page you already loaded, so the link you type never reaches a server of ours and there is no saved code for anyone to charge you for later.

The image is unbranded. Open the downloaded SVG and it contains the pattern, the four-module quiet zone, and the two colours you chose. No corner mark, no "made with" strip, nothing to crop off. The PNG is the same picture rasterised at about 1,000 pixels square.

Where free stops is where static stops. A code from this page cannot be repointed after printing, and it cannot count a single scan, because nothing about it ever contacts a server. Editable TangoQR codes do both and are also free to make, with a small tangoqr wordmark in the bottom-right corner of the image as the trade. The table below puts the three options side by side.

Four questions to ask any free QR generator

"Free" describes several different deals, and the differences only surface after you have printed. Worth checking, here or anywhere else:

1. Does it want an account or an email before the download works? A preview costs a generator nothing; the download step is where the ask usually appears. This page has no field for either, only the link and the two colour pickers.
2. Is anything stamped on the image? Judge the downloaded file at full zoom, not the on-screen preview, and check the corners and the margin.
3. Can you get a vector file? A PNG is a fixed pixel grid with a ceiling on how large it prints cleanly. An SVG has no ceiling, and it is what a print shop would rather receive.
4. Is the code static or dynamic, and what happens when the free plan ends? A free code that is trackable or editable is a pointer at somebody's redirect. Ask what that pointer resolves to when the free tier stops or the account is closed, before the flyers go out. A static code has the mirror-image trade: nothing to expire, and nothing to change.

Four numbers, and the order to fix them in

A QR code that fails on paper almost never fails because of the data inside it. It fails on physics, and there are only four measurements involved.

Size. The working rule is 10:1, so the printed code should be at least a tenth as wide as the farthest distance anyone scans it from. A table tent read from 30 cm wants about 3 cm of code, a poster read from 2 m wants about 20 cm, a yard sign read from 5 m wants about 50 cm. The same ratio holds at the small end: our scan distance reference puts the minimum at 1 cm (0.4 in) for a business card or product label read from about 10 cm. The size calculator turns your own distance into a number.

The quiet zone. The QR specification requires an empty margin four modules wide on all four sides, and a scanner uses it to work out where the code begins. Both downloads from this page are drawn with that margin already included, so the white border around the pattern is part of the code rather than padding you can crop. A photo edge, a fold, or body text running into it is enough to break the read.

Contrast. Dark pattern on a light background, with real distance between the two in lightness rather than in hue. Two mid-tone brand colours can look strongly contrasting to a designer and arrive at the camera as one flat grey. Inverting the code, light pattern on a dark field, works on some scanners and not others, which is a gamble with no upside.

Resolution. Print from the SVG, or from a PNG rendered at 300 DPI at final size. Enlarging a small PNG softens every module edge into grey, and past a certain point a scanner can no longer tell one square from the next.

Why this generator is fixed at error correction level H

Every QR code carries redundant data so it can still be read when part of it is scratched, smudged, or covered. The standard defines four levels, L, M, Q and H, recovering roughly 7, 15, 25 and 30 percent of the symbol. There is no level picker on this page because it always encodes at H, the most forgiving of the four. That is the right default for something going onto a physical surface, and it is the level that leaves room to drop a logo into the middle later.

H is not free. Redundancy is more data, more data means a higher version, and a higher version means more and therefore smaller squares inside the same printed area. So the lever you actually control here is the length of what you type. Measured with the rqrcode library this site renders with, at level H, a 21-character short link encodes as a version 3 code, 29 modules across; a 161-character URL with campaign parameters on the end encodes as version 13, 69 modules across. Print both at 1 inch and the modules go from 0.027 in wide to 0.013 in, less than half. On a 3 cm table tent that is 0.8 mm squares against 0.39 mm. A camera held at a slight angle, or working in a dim room, is far likelier to resolve the first of those than the second.

If you need the sparsest code possible and the surface will stay clean, level L is what you would want. The recovery figures and that trade-off are set out in our error correction reference.

The field takes more than a URL

A QR code holds text. What a phone does with that text depends on the shape of it, because camera apps recognise a handful of conventional prefixes. The field above encodes whatever you type, so a code for a phone number, an email, or a text message is a matter of typing the right prefix rather than hunting for a different tool:

• Website link: https://example.com/menu opens the page in the phone's browser.
• Plain text: BATCH 4471-A shows on screen and opens nothing.
• Email: mailto:[email protected]?subject=Table%20booking starts a new email, addressed and titled. The person still sends it.
• Phone number: tel:+15551234567 offers to dial.
• Text message: sms:+15551234567?body=JOIN opens a prefilled message the person sends.
• Map point: geo:37.7749,-122.4194 hands coordinates to a map app. Support for this one is patchier than the rest.

Two rules prevent most of the failures. Percent-encode spaces and punctuation in a mailto subject or body, writing %20 for a space, because a raw space ends the URI. And write phone numbers in full international form, starting with the plus and the country code, so the code still works for somebody scanning it in another country. WiFi credentials and contact cards are text too, but they carry escaping and field-order rules of their own, which is why they get dedicated tools: the WiFi generator escapes the five reserved characters that otherwise cut a password in half, and the vCard generator writes the contact properties in the form phones expect. The full list, with what each prefix is defined by, is in the supported data types reference.

PNG for screens, SVG for anything printed

The PNG from this page comes out at about 1,000 pixels on a side, which is roughly 3.3 inches at 300 DPI. That covers a slide, an email signature, a social post, or a small printed code. It is a fixed pixel grid, so scaling it past that size is exactly where "my QR code printed blurry" comes from. The SVG has no such ceiling, because it describes the pattern as shapes rather than pixels, so one file is sharp on a business card and on a banner. Send the SVG to a printer and keep the PNG for screens. If a print shop asks for a PDF, open the SVG in any vector editor and export one; nothing about the pattern changes.

Test the print, not the preview

A proof takes two minutes and is the only step that proves anything.

1. Print one copy at final size on the real stock. Glossy card and matte paper do not reflect the same way.
2. Scan it from the distance people will actually stand at, not from six inches away.
3. Try two phones, ideally one iPhone and one Android, in the lighting the code will live in. A dim dining room is a different test from an office.
4. Read the link back out of the image with our QR code URL checker and check it character by character. A typo scans perfectly and lands nowhere.

Then the last question, the one this page cannot answer for you: will that URL still be right in six months? A code from here is static, so the answer has to be yes. If it might not be, print an editable TangoQR code and change the destination later without touching the print run.