The Permanence Promise
Your printed QR codes keep working. Not as a courtesy, and not while you keep paying — as a commitment written into our terms, with a technical design behind it and a fallback that works even if this company ceases to exist.
The problem this exists to solve
If you search for complaints about QR code platforms, the same story comes back from review sites, forums and trade press. Somebody printed flyers, or a menu, or a decal for a van. A trial ended, or a card expired, or a plan lapsed. The code stopped going where it was supposed to and started going to a page asking them to subscribe.
The reason this keeps happening is structural. A dynamic QR code is a rented redirect: the vendor owns the short URL, and the customer has already paid a printer. That is enormous leverage, and most of the industry has built its pricing on top of it.
We think that is a bad way to make money, and also an unnecessary one. So here is what we do instead.
1. Codes freeze. They do not die.
When your subscription lapses, you downgrade, or you simply have more codes than your plan allows, the extra codes are marked frozen.
A frozen code:
- still redirects to its destination, indefinitely;
- still records every scan, which you will see if you come back;
- cannot be edited until you free a slot or upgrade.
That is the whole difference. There is no state in our software where a code you have printed returns a 404, an advert, a parking page, or a subscription prompt. The redirect handler does not check your plan — it cannot, because it does not load it.
When codes do freeze, we freeze the newest ones first and keep your oldest codes live, because the oldest are the most likely to already be on something physical that someone paid to produce.
2. Scans are never metered
Several platforms cap how many scans they will record and stop counting at the limit. The failure is quiet and badly timed: the moment a campaign works better than you expected is the moment your reporting goes dark.
We do not cap scans on any plan, including the free one. We can say that honestly because of the arithmetic: a scan is one edge request and one database write, costing us around $0.0000013. Charging for that would cost more in billing than in service.
3. The Permanence Kit — the part that does not depend on us
Everything above is a promise from a company you have no history with. That is a reasonable thing to be sceptical about, so the most important part of this page is the part that works whether or not you trust us.
At any time, on any plan including free, you can download your Permanence Kit. It contains:
- A static QR code for every dynamic code you have, encoding that code's current destination directly in the pattern. Static codes do not route through us. They have no account, no subscription and no expiry, and they will still work in twenty years. If you ever need to walk away, reprint from these and nothing breaks.
- codes.csv — every code, its address, and where it points.
- scans.csv — your complete scan history.
- A README that explains the difference between static and dynamic codes, and includes step-by-step instructions for migrating to a competitor without reprinting anything.
That last item is deliberate. A company confident in its product should be able to tell you how to leave it.
4. If we ever shut down
Startups fail. If this one does, we have committed to:
- 12 months' notice before redirects stop;
- publishing the complete mapping of every code address to its destination, so anyone can reconstruct or re-host it;
- keeping redirects resolving throughout the notice period.
Combined with the static fallbacks in your kit, that means your printed material is not hostage to our survival. This is in the Terms of Service.
What we are not promising
Honesty requires the limits too. We are not promising that a code you delete yourself keeps working — deleting is your decision, we warn you clearly, and we retire that address permanently rather than reissuing it to someone else. We are not promising uptime perfection; we publish a status page and our health checks run every ten minutes. And we are not promising that a static code you printed will survive you changing the destination — static codes cannot be changed, which is both their weakness and the reason they never expire.
Questions about the promise
Is the Permanence Promise actually binding, or just marketing?
It is written into our Terms of Service, which is the contract between us. A page can be edited quietly; terms are versioned and we publish the change history.
What exactly does "frozen" mean?
A frozen code redirects normally and records every scan. The single thing you cannot do is change its destination. Unfreeze it by deleting another code to free a slot, or by moving to a plan with more room.
What if I never pay you again?
Then you are on the free plan, three of your dynamic codes stay fully editable, and the rest stay frozen — still redirecting, still counting scans — indefinitely. There is no expiry timer.
What if ScanMePlz is acquired?
The Permanence Promise is in the Terms, and the Terms travel with the company. If a buyer wanted to change them, existing customers would get the same 12 months' notice described below. We cannot bind a future owner's intentions, which is exactly why the Permanence Kit exists: it does not depend on anyone's good faith.