Free QR Code Menus: Where the Free Tier Stops

You printed forty table tents in January. In March the supplier put pasta up, so the board says 16 euros and the code on the table still says 14. Everything works exactly as built: the code scans, the page loads. The price on it is just last year's.

Free QR menu tools are genuinely free, right up to the day you need to change something. That is not stinginess. It is what they are built to sell.

Why every free tier stops somewhere

A static QR code holds the address itself. The pattern of dark modules is the destination, which is why it works forever, needs no account, and cannot be taken away from you. It is also why it can never be changed. Reprint or nothing.

A dynamic code holds a short vendor address that bounces to wherever you point it. The sticker on the table stays put, the menu behind it changes, switched from a dashboard in ten seconds.

There is no standards body defining any of this. ISO/IEC 18004 standardises the symbology, the pattern itself, and says nothing about redirects. Strictly, a dynamic code is a static code that happens to encode a redirect URL. The redirect is what you are buying.

Which explains the shape of every price list in this market. When the product is a redirect, the redirect is what has to be charged for: the vendor gives away what costs it nothing, static codes, and meters what does. Scans, codes, menu items, pick any dial. A free tier here is not a trial of the product. It is the same product with the useful part switched off.

What that costs you in practice

Uniqode shows the mechanism most clearly. Static codes are, in their words, "completely free and never expire", and they confirm that "static QR Codes do not have a scan limit". Dynamic codes get 14 days, after which they go inactive: the sticker on your table stops leading anywhere at all.

QRCodeChimp runs a permanent free tier rather than a trial: unlimited static codes, 10 dynamic ones, one account, 1,000 scans a month across all of them. Hold that cap against your own room. A venue serving 60 covers a day, two people scanning per table, is near 3,600 scans a month. The free thousand is gone by the middle of the second week.

Menu Tiger meters the menu rather than the codes: one store, seven categories, seven items each, 200 QR orders a month. Editing really is free, and you can change the menu at any time without charge. The wall is the size. Seven items in a category is a wine list that ends at the house red.

All three price in US dollars. None publishes a euro figure, so what leaves your account moves with the exchange rate and with whatever your card issuer adds.

The PDF in a Drive folder, and its ceiling

There is an obvious way around the whole business. Export the menu as a PDF, put it in Google Drive, set sharing to "Anyone with the link", point a free static code at it. Google confirms anyone with that link can open the file without signing in. Replace the file, the link holds, nothing needs reprinting.

For a bakery counter with twelve items that change twice a year, this is the right answer and there is nothing else worth selling you.

For a working dining room it is a floor, not a foundation. The Government Digital Service moved GOV.UK off PDFs precisely because they "generally require a lot of zooming in and out, and scrolling both vertically and horizontally", and because that "is especially troublesome with long documents and on small devices like mobile phones". The W3C asks that content stay readable at 320 CSS pixels without scrolling in two directions (WCAG 2.1, Success Criterion 1.4.10, Level AA). An A4 page on a phone in a dim room does not come close.

And the bigger point: a PDF is a file, not a page. Google will not index your dishes, so nobody finds you by searching for what you serve. Guests cannot switch language. Someone who scanned last month may still be reading a cached copy of last season. You solved the reprint problem at the cost of making the menu invisible.

Stop paying for the redirect

Every constraint above grows from the same root. The vendor is selling you the hop from the code on the table to the page behind it, so the hop has to be counted, capped and switched off when you stop paying. It is a perfectly good business. It is just a strange thing for a restaurant to rent.

A menu does not need a redirect. It needs to be a page, at an address you control, that you can edit. Once it is, there is nothing left to meter: no scan counter, because a scan is just somebody reading a page; no expiry, because no subscription is holding the hop open; no reprinting, because the address never moves.

That is the test worth applying to anything you are shown. Can you edit the menu without paying? Is there a scan cap, and does it survive your actual covers? Is the number of items limited? And where does the menu live: at your address, or in someone else's folder?

Our free plan answers all four the way a restaurant needs, for a simple reason: the menu is not a separate product here, it is part of a system the room uses every day. Hollapp is reservations, floor and guests; the menu is one of the things a venue has. There is no redirect in the middle to charge for.

So Starter is free forever rather than for a month: no scan cap, no limit on categories or items, no charge for edits. Behind a single code the menu opens in every language you add, rather than in three someone else picked for you, which none of the free tiers above will do at any price. A website and booking requests come with it, so the room gets a working system rather than a standalone page of dishes. If you have never set one up, the step-by-step walkthrough covers the process.

Common questions

Will my QR code stop working if I cancel a subscription?

A dynamic one can. Uniqode states that dynamic codes go inactive once the trial ends unless you upgrade, which means live tables pointing at nothing. A static code cannot be switched off by anyone, because there is no service in the middle to switch off. Ask this before you print, not after.

Will I have to reprint the codes if I move to another provider?

If the menu lived behind someone else's redirect, yes: the address belonged to the vendor, and it leaves with the subscription. If the menu is a page at your own address, the content moves and the stickers on the tables stay. That is the hidden price of a free dynamic code, and it usually becomes visible at the point where leaving is already expensive.

Do I even need a QR menu?

No. If the menu is short and changes twice a year, a printed card and a PDF behind a link will do. A QR menu starts paying for itself where prices and dishes move constantly, where guests read in different languages, and where a dish taken off at seven should be gone from the guest's phone before the waiter reaches the table.

Where this lands

Free QR menu tools are free because they sell you the part you cannot see: the hop from the code on the table to the page. Everything you run into later, the scan cap, the expiry, the seven-item category, is that meter doing its job.

You can dodge it with a PDF and accept an invisible menu, or you can stop renting the hop. Our Starter plan is free forever and covers the menu completely: unlimited items, as many languages as your guests read, edits whenever you want them, no scan cap.