Do QR codes expire?

The honest answer is: a QR code itself never expires. It’s a pattern of dots. Dots can’t tell time.

What can expire is the redirect on the other side of the QR — and only if the QR is the redirect kind, and only if whoever runs that redirect decides to flip a switch. Most “expired QR” stories are the same story: someone sold you a free trial without calling it a free trial.

Let’s break it down.

A static QR code lives forever

A static QR code encodes your destination directly into the dots. When someone scans it, their phone reads the URL straight off the paper — no server in the middle. There is nothing on a server that can be turned off, because there is nothing on a server in the first place.

Concretely: if you generated a static QR for https://my-restaurant.com/menu in 2018, and my-restaurant.com/menu still resolves today, the QR still works. If you generated it in 2002, and the website still works, the QR still works. The QR doesn’t care how old it is.

Static QRs only stop “working” if:

• Your destination URL stops resolving — the website went away, or the path changed.
• The print is physically damaged beyond what error correction can recover.
• The print is too small or low-contrast to scan at the distance people are scanning from.

None of those are expirations. They’re problems on your side, not the QR’s side.

A dynamic QR depends on whoever runs the redirect

A dynamic QR encodes a short URL on someone else’s domain — typically the QR provider’s. When someone scans, they hit that provider’s server, which looks up where to forward them and issues a redirect.

The QR still doesn’t expire. The redirect, on the other hand, can do whatever its operator wants:

• Keep working forever. (This is what we do at AFQR.)
• Stop working after 14 days unless the customer pays. (This is what most “free” QR generators do.)
• Stop working when the company goes out of business or shuts down a product line. (This is unavoidable for any redirect from any provider — we’re upfront about it.)

If your dynamic QR has “expired,” it was almost certainly the first one. The QR is fine. The redirect was rented to you on a free trial without that being said out loud.

How to tell which kind you have

Pull out your phone, point it at the QR, and look at the URL preview that appears before you tap to open. Two cases:

• The URL shown is your domain (my-restaurant.com/menu). It’s a static QR. It will not expire.
• The URL shown is someone else’s domain (qr.example.com/r/abc123). It’s a dynamic QR. Whether it expires depends on the operator of that domain.

If the dynamic-QR provider’s docs are vague about whether redirects are permanent, assume they aren’t. Companies that plan to keep your redirect alive forever will say so plainly; companies that plan to expire it usually leave that part out.

”Free trial” is the polite name for it

The QR-as-a-service industry has converged on a specific bait-and-switch:

1. Advertise “free QR code generator” on the homepage.
2. Default new codes to dynamic without explaining the difference.
3. Set the redirect to expire after 14 days unless the user upgrades to ~$15/month.
4. When users complain, tell them they’ve “expired the free plan.”

The QR didn’t expire. The QR doesn’t know what a billing cycle is. It’s the same code it was on day one — the redirect just got pointed at an upgrade page.

We’ve written about this at length in the 14-day expiration trick, which covers the redirect-middleman pattern in detail.

What AFQR does

For static QRs: nothing. The code is generated entirely in your browser, encodes your URL directly, and never touches our servers. There is nothing we could expire even if we wanted to.

For dynamic QRs at afqr.codes: the redirect doesn’t expire. There’s no 14-day clock, no upgrade prompt that turns off your link, no “free tier” that mysteriously stops resolving. You can keep up to 1,000 dynamic codes per account, all working indefinitely, all free.

The only way a dynamic AFQR redirect stops working is if you delete it yourself — or if we genuinely shut down the company. (If that ever happens, we’ll give as much advance notice as we can and export your destinations so you can rehost them. We won’t disappear quietly.)

TL;DR

• The QR code itself cannot expire. It’s just dots on paper.
• A static QR points directly at your URL and lives forever.
• A dynamic QR points at a redirect controlled by someone else, and that redirect can be turned off by whoever owns it.
• Most “expired QRs” are dynamic QRs whose provider quietly turned off the redirect to push an upgrade.
• If you want a code that genuinely never expires, generate it as a static QR and encode your URL directly. (You can do that for free right here.)