Permanent QR codes: what “free for life” actually means

There is a sentence you find everywhere in our trade: "your QR code never expires".

It is appealing. It tells half the story.

A printed QR code has no expiry date: as long as the pattern stays readable, a phone will read it. The real question is elsewhere. What happens to the address it points to? Can the card still be edited in three years? What happens the day you stop paying? And who, exactly, is committing to keep all of this running?

We wanted to answer without relying on slogans. Ours included.

Fourteen services, their own pages

On 8 August 2026 we read the official pages of fourteen digital business card services: pricing, help centres, terms, permanence claims.

For each one we recorded things that can be checked:

• whether a free personal plan genuinely exists;
• how long it lasts, and how many cards it gives;
• whether an app has to be installed — by the person receiving the card;
• whether details can be edited after printing;
• scan caps and analytics limits;
• whether permanence is claimed explicitly;
• and contradictions between pages of the same vendor.

Everything is published, with its sources: the full dataset and the reference article.

What the reading taught us

Almost everyone offers a free way in. But "free" covers realities that have nothing in common: one card, two, four, capped scans, a truncated history, or ordinary features held back for the paid plan.

"Permanent" varies just as much. Some write it plainly. Others only promise that the details stay editable — which is not the same thing. A few sites use two different wordings depending on which page you open.

We kept those contradictions in the data rather than smoothing them over. Where evidence is missing, we write "not found". A missing proof is not an accusation, and a marketing sentence is not a legal guarantee.

What GetQRcard promises, exactly

Every card is given a short address of the form `getqrcard.com/q/XXXXXXX`. That is what the QR code encodes, and that is what goes to print. It never moves. You only change what it displays.

The free plan includes:

• a digital business card and its permanent QR address;
• details you can edit without ever reprinting;
• a contact file that saves on iPhone and Android alike;
• an email signature carrying the QR code;
• scan totals, by device and by country, from the very first day, plus a day-by-day curve over the last thirty days;
• no advertising, and no time limit on that first card.

Whoever scans it installs nothing. The card opens in their browser and saves in the standard contact format.

The yearly plan at €15 adds unlimited cards, bulk generation from a spreadsheet, a hosted PDF document, and the account holder's name confirmed by the payment provider.

If the subscription ends, the first card returns to the free plan: active, editable. Extra cards are paused, not deleted.

One precision this article owes you

Since we are holding others to their wording, here is ours, in plain terms.

We delete no scans. There is not a single command in our code that erases a history. Total scans, and the breakdown by device and by country, are counted from the card's first day, on both plans.

Exactly one thing is limited: the day-by-day curve. It covers thirty days on the free plan and ninety on the yearly one. Not because the data is missing, but because a curve with three hundred and sixty-five points cannot be read.

It is a detail. It is precisely the kind of detail this study was looking for in others.

What we cannot promise

Nobody can honestly swear that a web service will still exist in fifty years. We will not pretend otherwise.

What we can make verifiable is who runs the service, on what model, and under which rules today.

GetQRcard is published by Le Chemin Numérique ASBL, a Belgian non-profit based in Liège, registered under enterprise number 1039.717.066. A non-profit has no shareholders. Payments first cover the real costs — hosting, domains, email, backups, development — and any surplus funds the association's work in the primary schools of Wallonia.

The service is hosted at OVH, inside the European Union. Passwords are hashed. IP addresses used for statistics are hashed with a salt that changes every day: past midnight, nobody — ourselves included — can tie two visits to the same person. No advertising, no Google Analytics, no third-party tracker. Data is neither sold nor rented. The detail is in our privacy policy.

A study that includes us, and can contradict us

GetQRcard is in the comparison. Rafaël Saive, our founder, is its author, and that is stated throughout the repository. Hiding the link would make the study less credible, not more independent.

The dataset names no winner. It is published under CC BY 4.0, and any vendor can request a correction by providing an official source. We will make it.

Five questions to ask before printing a QR code

Do not just ask whether the QR code is free. Ask:

• which exact address it contains;
• whether its content will stay editable, and for how long;
• what becomes of the card after a cancellation;
• who operates the service, and under what legal status;
• where those commitments are written down.

A permanent QR code should not be a magic phrase. It should be a promise precise enough to be checked — and modest enough to hold.