Your QR code says it is no longer active
Somebody has scanned something you printed and got a page asking for a subscription instead of your menu, your donation form or your booking page. This is fixable, usually today, and usually with the company you are already annoyed with. Here is the order to do it in.
First, what has actually happened
Your code is a dynamic one. The printed pattern contains a short link belonging to the service that made it, and the service has stopped resolving that link to your destination — normally because a trial ended, a card was declined, or a subscription lapsed. The pattern on the paper is undamaged and still contains exactly what it always did. Nothing physical needs reprinting to fix this.
That is the good news and it is worth holding on to, because the immediate instinct is to reprint. Do not order anything yet.
Work out who made it
If you do not remember which service you used — and after eighteen months almost nobody does — the code will tell you. Scan it and read the address it resolves through, before the page loads. It will look like a short host and a few random characters, and the short host is the vendor.
The most reliable way to identify it is to put the host on its own into a browser, without the characters after the slash. Several vendors answer a bare short domain with a page explaining whose it is. QRCG’s does exactly that: visiting qrco.de with nothing after it lands on their own support article, which confirms the domain is theirs and mentions l.ead.me as another of theirs.
A caution, because guessing here wastes an afternoon. Short hosts are not always guessable from the brand name, vendors run several at once and retire them over time, and some plausible-looking domains belong to entirely different companies — uqr.to, for instance, is a separate product rather than the vendor most people assume. Check the host, do not infer it.
If the host tells you nothing, search your email for “QR” around the date the artwork was made. The receipt or the sign-up confirmation will be there, and it is faster than guessing.
Get it working again, with them
Reactivating with the original vendor is nearly always the fastest route back, and often the cheapest, because you are restoring an existing code rather than deploying a new one to the world. Sign in, look for the lapsed or expired code, and pay for the tier that covers it.
Three things worth knowing before you do, all read from the vendors’ own pages on 9 August 2026:
- Ask about the annual commitment. Several vendors only publish an annual price. Uniqode’s own pricing FAQ says “We currently do not offer monthly plans”. QRCG’s Starter plan is billed monthly or annually, and its listed prices carry the footnote “*Value added tax not included” — so a UK card is charged more than the number on the page.
- Ask how long they keep your data. QR TIGER’s FAQ says “if your plan expires, we will retain your data for a maximum period of 1 year”, after which “it is possible that we remove all data from your account”. If your code lapsed a long time ago, reactivation may not bring the destination back with it.
- Check the notice period before you cancel anything. QRCG’s pricing page states “The notice period is always 30 days before the end of the contract period”. Cancelling on the day of renewal is not cancelling.
Once it resolves again, scan the actual printed copy — not the file, not the preview in the dashboard. The thing you need to know is that the object in the world works.
If you cannot get back in
If the account is gone, the address is dead or nobody answers, the printed pattern is now pointing at a host you do not control and there is no way to take it over. At that point the code is genuinely finished, and the honest answer is that you are reprinting.
Two things worth doing anyway. Ask for a refund if you were billed for a period the codes did not work in — that is a straightforward argument and people do win it. And if the destination was a page on your own site, put something useful at the old address, because copies of the code will keep being scanned for years.
Then decide about moving, not before
We sell a competing product, so treat what follows accordingly. The reason it is at the bottom of this page rather than the top is that switching does not fix the code in your hand: moving to any other provider, including us, means a new short link, which means a new pattern, which means reprinting. Reactivating does not. Deal with the emergency first.
When you do come to reprint, the question worth asking every candidate is not whether their codes are dynamic — they all are — but what happens to your printed material when you stop paying them. We put each vendor’s own answer, quoted and dated, on one page, ours included. Our position is that cancelling drops the account to the free tier and everything already printed carries on resolving; that is enforced by a test that runs inside every deploy, and it is stated on the pricing section rather than in a help article.
And whoever you go with, read the print guide before you send the artwork. The second most common way to waste a print run has nothing to do with subscriptions.