The most consequential decision you will make about a QR code, and the one most people make by accident.
Make a QR code freeEvery code the free generator produces is static, which means the destination is baked into the pattern itself. The URL, phone number, or Wi-Fi password lives in the black and white modules. That makes static codes permanent and completely private — nothing routes through a third party, and the code keeps working even if the company that generated it disappears. The trade-off is that a static code can never be changed. Reprint the artwork, and you reprint the destination.
A dynamic QR code encodes a short redirect URL instead of your final destination. The pattern stays identical while the destination is stored in a dashboard you control. That gives you two capabilities a static code physically cannot have: you can change where a printed code points after it has been printed, and you can count and analyse every scan — how many, when, from which city, on which device.
Use static codes for anything that will not change and does not need measuring: a Wi-Fi password on a table tent, a vCard on a business card, a phone number on a van. Use dynamic codes for anything with a marketing budget behind it — packaging, out-of-home advertising, print ads, event collateral, direct mail. If you are spending money to put a code in front of people, you need to know whether it worked, and you need the ability to fix a broken destination without a reprint.
Scan counts tell you a code was used. UTM parameters tell you what happened next. By tagging the destination URL with utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign, scan traffic lands in Google Analytics 4 as an identifiable channel instead of collapsing into direct traffic. A code on a conference banner tagged utm_source=saas-summit and utm_medium=qr can be traced all the way through to signups and revenue. Without tags, that same traffic is indistinguishable from someone typing your address by hand.
Ten types, twelve designs, PNG, SVG, and PDF download. No account, no expiry, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
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