About OpenQR

OpenQR is a free, open-source QR code generator built and maintained by Sam Moreton, a software engineer who got tired of every “free” QR tool hiding a watermark, a paywall, or a sign-up wall behind a thirty-year-old open standard that costs nothing to use.

Why OpenQR exists

A QR code is just text encoded as a square of dots (ISO/IEC 18004). There is no good reason to charge for, watermark, or track that. OpenQR is built on three principles:

• Free. No watermarks, no size caps, no account — the core generator is free for everyone, forever.
• Open source. The whole tool is published under the AGPL-3.0 licence, so you can read every line, verify what it does, or self-host it.
• Privacy-first. Static QR codes are generated entirely in your browser — the content you encode never touches a server.

Who writes the guides

The guides, comparisons and API docs on this site are written by Sam — the person who actually builds and ships the product, not an outsourced content desk. That means the advice here comes from working directly with the QR specification, error correction, real-world print and scanning quirks, and the trade-offs between static and dynamic codes day to day.

Where a claim is checkable, it's grounded in the published standard or in OpenQR's own open code rather than asserted. If something here is wrong or out of date, the source is public — open an issue and it gets fixed.

What might cost money

Only the parts that genuinely need a server running around the clock: dynamic QR codes (one printed code whose destination you can edit later), scan analytics, and the API/MCP layer for developers. Those are opt-in. Everything you can do on the homepage stays free.