Just put the QR in the bag bro

TLDR: Frustrated by BS hostage-happy websites for generating QR codes, I built/vibed https://qr.42.mk in an hour or so, go ahead, use it, and whenever you need a QR code, just go there, grab it and move on with your life.

Now, while the tool was 100% AI generated with very minor tweaks from my side, this post was 99% human written, 1% being the titles for more manageable reading, I'm by no means a good writer, if you want to read the story, thank you, and go right ahead!

You can find me on the Base42 Discord if you want to chat about the blog, the universe or anything.

Step 1: You Just Need a QR Code

Picture this - you're building promotional materials for your event, venue or whatever, you have your design ready to go, a placeholder in the middle for a QR code, your guests will scan it and learn more about your event, it will be great!

You, being the well-prepared designer that you are, prepare your media materials months ahead, painstakingly designing and detailing everything, "It's perfect!" you exclaim, then you remember that you still have a placeholder in your QR code slot, so you do what anyone would do:

1. Type in QR code generator into google.com

2. Paste your link

3. A popup comes up prompting you to sign in

   1. It has Login with Google available, so why not

   2. You login

   3. You click free plan or something

4. Download the QR code

5. You get your QR Code

6. ???

7. Profit

Victory! Now that whole side quest is complete, you put the cherry on top, your QR code is finally placed into the placeholder, the whole picture finally tied together, feng shui in place and all that. Being the diligent designer that you are, you test it and validate it works, huzzah!

Ship it! You send it to the print company, they print it and a few days later, you have your beautiful designs ready to be passed around as fliers, stickers or whatever other physical media may be. A week or so later you start your campaign and the flyers get passed around, people are scanning, conversions are happening, yay!

The Hostage Email

Then a few days later, you get this:

Oh yeah, that QR code you generated, plopped into your design, shipped to printing and paid the invoice for - it's being held hostage by one of the many predatory QR code generators out there, all of which seem to rank pretty high on Google. I could write an entire blog post on the predatory tactics and dark patterns they use to cling onto any desperate attempt at monetizing something that is at best a single use app. Sure, they provide tracking and analytics, but that's not what you need every time, and it should certainly not be the default.

To continue, pay up, friend:

Just $9.99/month, what a steal!

I'll Build My Own, With Clankers and Prompting

If you've been following Base42, you know what we are - a hackerspace, where people hack on different projects, experiment and so on. If you're following us on socials, are in the Base42 Discord server, or just maybe stumbled upon Vasilaki's last post you would know that last month we held NSND, a sort of un-conference, where you just come, talk about random stuff and maybe something comes out of it.

So we did. Someone mentioned generating a QR code and immediately triggered flashbacks of every time I've fallen victim to this exact hustle.

One Wish, One Hour

There's this magic black box called AI that you can throw your wishes into, something clanks along and voila, you have your very own app, vibes and all. That's what I did - while everything else was happening during NSND, people showing off home infrastructure setups, talking about what we'd host on the new Base42 server rack and so on, I put my wish into the wishing well that is a coding agent.

Here's what my wish was:

"Build a QR code generator, should work fully in the browser, make it available as a PWA, no server, make no mistakes"

And it did. Very little mistakes, pretty much a 1-shot from the get-go, and around 1h in it was fully deployed.

Meet QR Canvas

I present to you QRC - let's call it QR Canvas, the pronunciation makes it funny.

It supports everything you would need and more - fully customize your QR code, add a logo, pick from templates, all for free, all within your browser. You can even install the PWA on your phone, tablet, laptop and take it with you offline.

There's even support for adding a logo!

Goes without saying, it's Open Source

The code is all there if you want to poke around, contribute, or just verify that yes, it really is just a browser and nothing else. Fork it, improve it, make it yours. Heed my warning though, the codebase IS AI SLOP, essentially, but it's AI slop that totally works, does the job and doesn't need further updates as far as I'm concerned. If you have a better coding agent that would like to rewrite this in the JS framework dejure, go ahead and open a PR, I'll tell my AI to check your AI's work! 🤣

github.com/42dotmk/qrc

Go Use It

No account. No popup. No hostage email three weeks from now. Just qr.42.mk - open it, generate your code, download it, done.

If you find a bug, fix it yourself.