The $1 QR code trial, and what their own terms say happens next

What does a $1 QR code trial actually cost?

Somewhere between $479.88 and $637 in the first year, depending on which ad you clicked.

Four QR code generators are currently buying Google ads for a version of the same offer: a dollar or two, seven days, unlimited codes. GetQR’s terms put the trial at “$1.00 USD in the United States.” MyQRCode and QRcreate both sell theirs at $1.95. QR Code Creator gives you seven days free.

Day eight is where they differ from each other, and where all four differ from us.

Skip the trial and own the code for $7.99, once.

Credit where it’s due

Three of these four tell you what happens, in writing, before you pay. That deserves saying.

QR Code Creator puts the disclaimer on its own homepage rather than burying it: static codes keep working, dynamic ones do not. Its help centre answers the cancellation question in a dedicated article with a date on it. GetQR publishes a cancellation page you can reach without logging in. MyQRCode and QRcreate both print “renews to $49 every 4 weeks” directly on the pricing card, next to the $1.95, where you cannot miss it.

None of that is hidden. The information is there for anyone who reads the fine print before clicking, which is roughly nobody, which is rather the point of putting it in the fine print.

What their own terms say happens when you stop paying

QRcreate is the bluntest. Its terms, section 5.3:

“any dynamic QR codes created during the trial will cease to function and will no longer be scannable”

MyQRCode says the same thing in different words:

“Your dynamic QR codes will no longer be scannable.”

QR Code Creator is the only one of the four that answers the question people actually have, which is not about trials at all but about what happens years later when you cancel a plan you have been paying for. Its help centre, in an article titled “What happens to my QR codes when I cancel my subscription?”:

“Your QR codes will still be active until the end of your subscription plan. Once your plan expires, all created dynamic QR codes will be invalid.”

Worth being precise here, because the difference matters. QRcreate and MyQRCode only spell out what happens when the trial lapses. Their terms do not say what a paid cancellation does. We are not going to tell you it kills the code, because they have not told us that either.

GetQR, which runs the most ads of the four, states the principle outright and then goes soft on the timing:

“Dynamic redirect functionality depends on an active subscription: dynamic redirects may stop working when the associated account is closed.”

The first clause is the honest one, and it is the whole business model in six words: the redirect depends on an active subscription. The second clause hedges, “may” rather than “will,” and only on account closure. So they will tell you what you are renting. They just will not tell you the exact day it ends.

Four weeks is not a month

MyQRCode and QRcreate both renew at “$49 every 4 weeks.”

A year holds 13 four-week periods, not 12. So $49 every four weeks is not $588 a year. It is $637 a year, and the extra $49 is doing its work quietly, in the calendar.

We would rather just show you the arithmetic than make anything of it.

The part that isn’t on the pricing page

Every one of these plans is priced like software. You pay monthly, you get features, you cancel when you are done. That model works fine for things that live on a screen.

A QR code is not on a screen. It is on the menu you had printed in March, the sticker on the van, the sign in the window, the 2,000 flyers in the storage room. The subscription is a monthly decision. The print run was a one-time decision, and it already happened.

That mismatch is the whole thing. Nobody cancels a QR subscription because they stopped wanting the code to work. They cancel because the card expired, or the business changed hands, or the person who set it up left, or $49 every four weeks stopped making sense for one link. The menu on the table does not know about any of that.

What a year costs

	Entry	Then	Dynamic codes	First year
GetQR	$1.00, 7 days, non-refundable	$39.99/month	Not stated in pricing	$479.88
MyQRCode	$1.95, 7 days	$49 every 4 weeks	Unlimited	$637
QRcreate	$1.95, 7 days	$49 every 4 weeks	Unlimited	$637
QR Code Creator	Free, 7 days	$11.1/month, billed annually	3	$133.20
Graklink	None	Nothing	$7.99 each, forever	$23.97 for 3

The cheapest of the four is QR Code Creator’s Basic plan: $133.20 a year, for three codes, every year, for as long as you want those three codes to keep working.

One note on that row, since the rest of this page is built on quotes you can go and check. Every other figure above comes from a page we archived, so it stays checkable even if they reword it. QR Code Creator’s prices are the exception: their pricing page is drawn after it loads, and the Internet Archive came back with no prices in it. That row rests on a screenshot we took on 16 July 2026. Check their live page, and if it disagrees with us, believe them.

$133.20 at Graklink buys 16 dynamic codes outright. Not for a year. Outright.

What Graklink does instead

A dynamic code is $7.99, once. You can change where it points as often as you like, forever. There is no subscription to lapse because you already paid the entire fee. $7.99 once.

We sell analytics separately, at $9.99 a month or $99 a year, and we keep it separate on purpose: cancelling it turns off the scan charts and nothing else. Your codes do not notice. That is the line we will not cross, because the moment analytics can switch off a printed code, we are just a subscription company with better manners.

Exactly two things can stop a Graklink code, and neither of them is money: using it for phishing, malware, fraud or anything illegal, or deleting your own account.

The $1 trial is genuinely cheaper than we are, for seven days. We are cheaper on day eight, and every day after that, for the life of whatever you printed it on.

Buy a code that has no renewal date at graklink.com.