QR Services Are Scamming You – IT HAS TO STOP

Most QR services scam users with overpriced plans, fake limits, and lock-in tricks. Here’s why the industry is broken and what needs to change.

Introduction

The rise of QR codes exploded during the COVID period. Suddenly, everyone needed contactless menus and touch-free ways to share information. That adoption did not fade away. Businesses realized QR codes were useful in all kinds of contexts, from promoting events to tracking customer engagement.

But here is the uncomfortable truth: behind this very simple technology, an entire industry of "QR services" has grown that is not built on quality, but on manipulation. If you search on Google today for "best QR generator" or "dynamic QR code service", the first results you see are not the best options. They are just the companies that learned how to exploit Google’s search engine early enough, and they are still feeding on that advantage.

The problem is that these companies are not just thriving because they ranked high. They are thriving because they designed their business models in a way that locks people in, makes them overpay, and hides important information until it is too late. Most people using QR codes do not realize this until they are stuck.

This article is long, detailed, and probably going to upset some people in that industry. That is fine. My purpose is not to be nice with companies that manipulate their customers. My purpose is to tell the truth as it is, from both a user perspective and a developer perspective.

I will break down exactly why most QR services are not trustworthy, how they trick both Google and customers, and why this whole scam keeps working. And in the end, I will also tell you why I built my own QR generator, not to join the scam, but to do the exact opposite.

Why Most QR Services Are Not Trustworthy

When you use a dynamic QR code service, you are not just creating a square image. You are relying on someone else’s infrastructure to manage redirection, analytics, and sometimes file hosting. That trust should come with responsibility. Unfortunately, most dynamic QR services on the market have chosen profit over honesty.

1. Overpriced for What They Actually Do

Let’s start with the most obvious part: price.
A static QR code (one that directly contains a link) costs nothing once generated. You could generate one offline on your computer, print it, and it will work forever without a server.

Dynamic QR codes are slightly different. They work by pointing to a short link that redirects to your real destination. This allows you to later change the link behind the code or collect analytics about how often the code is scanned. From a technical perspective, this requires:

  • A database to store the mapping between the QR code ID and the destination URL (Postgres, MySQL, etc.).
  • A small caching layer to make lookups fast (Redis).
  • An API that responds to scan requests and handles analytics.

The entire setup is lightweight. A single virtual server for a few dollars per month could handle thousands of users. The actual costs per QR code are fractions of a cent.

So why are most QR services charging 10 to 20 euros per month, sometimes even more?

Because they can.

They know small businesses and individuals are not going to calculate infrastructure costs. They hide behind the idea that “infrastructure is expensive” when in reality, it is not.

Now, charging money is not wrong. Companies like bit.ly or dub.co also run redirect services, but they justify higher prices by offering advanced features: A/B testing, team collaboration, CRM integration, deep analytics, and marketing automation. Those features require more development, more storage, and more value.

By comparison, many QR services are asking similar monthly fees but only provide simple redirection and basic analytics. In other words, they are charging premium rates for a basic service.

2. Deceptive Pricing Tactics

The overpricing is only part of the story. The real scam starts with how these services structure their pricing.

Go to any major QR service website and you will see something like this:

  • Free plan: 1 or 3 dynamic QR codes, limited scans.
  • Basic plan: 5 QR codes, 10k scans per month.
  • Pro plan: 20 QR codes, 50k scans.
  • Business plan: unlimited, but extremely expensive.

At first glance, this looks normal. But if you think about it, the limitations are artificial. There is no technical reason to block you from creating more than 5 dynamic QR codes or to stop tracking analytics after 10k scans. A database can store millions of rows without issue. The only reason these limits exist is to push you into upgrading.

This tactic is called a “dark pattern.” It is not based on cost, it is based on psychology. They design the plans in a way that makes you feel like the free tier is useless, the basic tier will be enough for a few weeks, and then you are forced to upgrade. It is the same technique phone operators used with SMS and data limits in the early 2000s.

What’s worse is that the features that should be standard, like the ability to edit a QR code destination, are often locked behind higher tiers. Editing a row in a database is the cheapest operation in computing, yet companies use it as a premium feature.

This is not just bad business design. It is intentionally deceptive.

3. Lock-in Tactics: The Hostage Situation

If the previous points were annoying, this one is a disaster. Most QR services implement a lock-in policy that ensures you cannot leave them without breaking your business.

Here is how it works:

  • You create QR codes with their service.
  • The QR codes point to their servers, which handle the redirects.
  • You use those codes in your menus, flyers, packaging, or even long-term products.
  • One day, you decide to unsubscribe because the price is too high or you found a better service.

What happens? Your QR codes stop working. Every scan leads to a dead link. Your customers cannot reach your menu, your clients cannot redeem your promotion, your packaging is now useless.

From the customer perspective, this feels like betrayal. From the company’s perspective, it is a deliberate trap. They know you will think twice before unsubscribing because the cost of broken QR codes is too high. This is not a technical limitation. They could easily allow your codes to keep redirecting even without analytics. But they choose not to, because lock-in guarantees recurring revenue.

This is the digital equivalent of changing the locks on your shop the moment you stop paying rent, even if you already paid for the furniture inside. It is legal, but it is morally questionable.

4. Customers Are Cash Cows

When you combine overpricing, deceptive pricing tiers, and lock-in tactics, the pattern is clear. Most QR services do not see their customers as partners to serve. They see them as cash cows to exploit.

The entire system is designed to maximize extraction, not value. And that is why calling them untrustworthy is not an exaggeration. It is the reality of how they operate.

Why the Scam Works

You might wonder: if these QR services are so overpriced, so manipulative, and so bad for customers, why are they still the ones people find first? Why do they dominate the search results while better, fairer alternatives struggle to get noticed?

The answer has little to do with quality. It has everything to do with timing, SEO tricks, and how the internet actually works today (and before).

1. Early Market Entry and SEO Exploitation

The biggest advantage these companies had was being early. When QR codes started becoming popular outside of Japan, there were not many services offering dynamic codes. A handful of companies rushed to build simple websites that generated QR codes, and they immediately started focusing on search engine rankings.

They stuffed their websites with the right keywords: “QR generator,” “best QR code service,” “free QR code creator.” Since competition was low at the time, Google rewarded them. Over time, their websites accumulated authority.

Today, even though many of these services have not innovated at all, they still sit at the top of search results. Google favors established domains, and these companies got there first.

2. PBNs and Fake Authority

Of course, they did not rely on luck alone. Many of them built massive backlink networks to trick Google into thinking they were more important than they really were.

This technique is called a Private Blog Network (PBN). It works like this:

  • The company or its SEO partner buys dozens or hundreds of cheap websites.
  • On each website, they publish fake “articles” like “Top 10 QR code generators in 2023.”
  • Every article conveniently links back to the same QR service, labeling it the number one option.
  • Google’s algorithm sees all those backlinks and assumes the service must be relevant and popular.

The truth is, most of those blogs have no real audience. They exist only to boost rankings.

If you dig deeper, you sometimes find these companies going even further: sneaking links into Wikipedia pages, publishing low-quality guest posts on random tech blogs, or paying directory sites to rank them first. None of this has anything to do with actual service quality. It is pure manipulation.

3. The ChatGPT Effect

For years, this SEO manipulation was bad enough. But with the arrival of ChatGPT and other AI tools that rely on web searches, the problem became even worse.

Here is why:

  • When you ask a language model, “What is the best QR code generator?”, the model often performs a search or relies on sources it was trained on.
  • Those sources are the same search results that have already been poisoned by PBNs and deceptive SEO.
  • As a result, the model repeats the same bad recommendations.

If you test this today, you will see it clearly. Ask ChatGPT for a “cheap and reliable QR service,” and most of the time it will list the same overpriced companies. Why? Because the top results it sees are controlled by those companies.

It gets worse: some of these QR services even write their own “comparison” blog posts. Titles like “We tested 100 QR code generators, here are the top 5” appear everywhere. Of course, they always crown themselves the winner. The trick works because both Google and AI models treat those articles as if they were independent reviews, when in fact they are self-promotion.

4. The Cycle of Bad Information

What we are seeing is a cycle:

  1. QR services manipulate SEO with backlinks, PBNs, and fake articles.
  2. Google rewards them with top spots because of link volume and domain age.
  3. AI tools like ChatGPT and Bing pull answers from those top spots.
  4. Users searching through AI get fed the same bad recommendations.
  5. Those services gain more customers, money, and visibility, reinforcing their position.

Breaking this cycle is almost impossible for smaller, honest services that cannot or will not play the same SEO games.

What This Means for Businesses and Users

At first sight, the problems with QR services might look like a technical debate about databases, pricing models, and SEO manipulation. But the reality is much simpler and much more damaging: the people who get hurt the most are small businesses, freelancers, and organizations that rely on QR codes in the real world.

The first issue is trust. Most people still believe that if a company shows up on the first page of Google, it must be reliable. That is how search engines trained us to think: the top results equal the best answers. But in the QR industry, the opposite is often true. The companies that invested early in SEO, backlinks, and fake “Top 10 QR generator” articles are the ones dominating the results today. They are not on top because they provide the best product, but because they played the SEO game earlier and harder than anyone else. The consequence is that cafés, event organizers, and small shops who just need a few QR codes for menus or tickets will often sign up for the first result they find, without realizing they are walking into a trap.

Then comes the money. A small restaurant that wants to put a QR code on every table for its digital menu might need 30 or 50 codes in total. From a technical standpoint, that costs almost nothing. Yet because of artificial limits set by the service, the restaurant will be forced into an expensive subscription, sometimes paying 20 or 30 euros per month. Over the course of a year, that is hundreds of euros spent not because QR codes are expensive to host, but because the service intentionally created limitations to squeeze more money out of its users. Multiply that by thousands of small businesses around the world, and you can see how this becomes a huge, ongoing drain.

But the real nightmare comes when businesses try to leave. Imagine you are an event organizer. For two years you have used a QR service, printing codes on banners, tickets, and merchandise. You decide the subscription is too expensive and you want to switch to another service. The moment you cancel, all your QR codes die. Every scan now leads to a dead page. Your flyers, your posters, your old tickets, even the products you already sold suddenly point to nothing. Fixing this means reprinting, redirecting customers manually, or in many cases, accepting the loss. The lock-in is so strong that most businesses do not even dare to leave, because the cost of broken codes would be higher than the overpriced subscription.

The worst part is that most people do not even realize this dependency exists. They assume that once they print a QR code, it belongs to them forever. They never think to ask what happens if they stop paying. It is only when they cancel a subscription or try to switch services that they discover the ugly truth: those codes were never really theirs. And by then, it is already too late.

And it is not just the businesses that suffer. When a customer scans a code and it does not work, they do not blame the QR service. They blame the business. A restaurant looks unprofessional if its menu QR code is broken. An event looks chaotic if ticket codes stop working. A product looks suspicious if a packaging QR points nowhere. The lock-in does not just trap businesses financially; it also damages their reputation with their own customers.

So the impact of these deceptive practices goes far beyond overpriced subscriptions. They create a hidden dependency that most people are unaware of, waste money that could be better invested elsewhere, and damage trust between businesses and their customers. What looks like a small technical issue is in fact a systemic problem affecting thousands of businesses every day.

Conclusion

The QR industry should have been simple. A QR code is nothing more than a bridge between the physical world and the digital world. It is a basic technology, open to everyone, and technically cheap to run. But instead of treating it as a simple utility, most companies in this space have turned it into a cash extraction machine.

The result is an industry where the loudest voices are not the most trustworthy, and where thousands of small businesses pay far more than they should for something that should be simple, reliable, and fair. Restaurants, cafés, event organizers, freelancers, marketers: all of them get trapped in subscriptions they cannot escape, wasting money and sometimes damaging their reputation with customers when codes suddenly stop working.

It does not have to be this way. A fair QR service is possible, and it is not complicated to build. Transparency, flat pricing, no lock-in, and technical honesty are not radical ideas. They are simply the bare minimum that customers should be able to expect. The fact that these qualities are rare in the current QR market is proof of how far the industry has drifted from serving users to exploiting them.

So the next time you see a “Top 10 QR services” list or a flashy ad promising “the best QR generator,” think twice. Ask yourself who wrote that article, why that company is showing up first, and what will really happen if you ever try to leave them.

The scam has gone on long enough. It is time to stop rewarding the companies that built their business on deception and start supporting those who put users first.

A Final Note: Why I Built My Own QR Service

At this point, I need to be transparent with you. I run a QR generator myself. And yes, part of the reason I am writing this article is because I am frustrated with the way the industry works and I wanted to create a better alternative. But unlike most of the services I criticized above, I want to explain clearly why I built mine and what makes it different.

The truth is that I did not create my QR generator because I thought it was an easy way to make money. I created it because I was sick of seeing people get locked in, overcharged, and tricked by deceptive pricing. I knew, as a developer, that running a reliable dynamic QR service is not expensive or complicated. A database, a caching system, and a simple API are enough to make it work at scale. So when I looked at companies charging ten, twenty, even fifty euros per month for something that costs cents to operate, I could not stand by and pretend it made sense.

That is why my service is built on a different set of principles. One flat plan that gives you everything. No artificial limits. No hidden traps. If you ever decide to cancel, your QR codes will keep working, because I believe that once you print a code and put it into the world, it should never stop working just because of a subscription. You may lose analytics if you leave, but the redirection will always remain. That is the kind of respect I think customers deserve.

I also chose to be honest about the technical side. I do not pretend that running a QR service costs a fortune, because it does not. My pricing reflects reality, not inflated margins. And I do not buy backlinks, spam “Top 10” lists, or edit Wikipedia pages to trick Google into showing me first. I am not interested in playing the same dirty games as the big players.

Yes, this is me promoting my own service. But I can say with confidence that I am doing it because I believe it is fair, transparent, and aligned with how QR codes should be: simple and trustworthy. I am not claiming to be perfect, but I am trying to build something that respects users instead of exploiting them.

If you agree that the way QR services operate today is broken, then I invite you to try mine. Not because I need to lock you in, but because I believe it is possible to do better, and I built it for people who think the same way.