How this QR code generator works

Codes are rendered in your browser. Two small server routes exist so you can turn a link into a QR code image without opening the site at all. This page explains both, and says who is behind it.

Client-side generation

QR codes are drawn in your browser

The generator on the home page uses qrcode.js for QR codes and bwip-js for the other eleven symbologies. Both are plain JavaScript libraries that run inside your tab and paint into a canvas.

Nothing is uploaded. The URL, the text, the logo image you pick and the colours you choose stay on your device — there is no request that could carry them anywhere, which you can confirm in your browser's network panel.

The same applies to the other tools. The QR code reader decodes an uploaded or pasted image in the tab, without a camera and without sending the image anywhere. The bulk QR code generator takes a list or a CSV and zips hundreds of PNG or SVG codes locally. The size calculator works out the minimum print size from the scan distance and the content, and the glossary defines the terms the rest of the site uses.

What runs in your browser

QRCode.toCanvas(canvas, url, options)

bwipjs.toCanvas(canvas, { bcid, text })

ctx.drawImage(logo, x, y, w, h)

canvas.toDataURL('image/png')

✓ All local. No network requests.

Server-side routes

The image API and the share page

There are two URL routes, and they return different things. makeqrco.de/qr/<url> returns a 512×512 image/png, or a different size, colour or format when you pass query parameters. That is the one to use in an <img> tag, in markdown, or in an HTML email.

makeqrco.de/<url> without the /qr/ segment returns an HTML page showing the same code, with Open Graph tags so it unfurls with a preview when you paste it into Slack, Discord or WhatsApp. It is a sharing surface for people, so it carries noindex and loads no analytics.

Both render on request. Nothing is written to disk and there is no database. Responses are cached for 24 hours so a repeated link is cheap to serve. The API page documents parameters, limits and error behaviour.

Usage examples

# Image, in HTML

# Image, in Markdown

![QR](https://makeqrco.de/qr/https://example.com)

# Shareable page with a link preview

https://makeqrco.de/https://example.com

Who runs makeqrco.de

makeqrco.de is built and maintained by Kyllian, a software developer who publishes under the GitHub organisation InstantlyMoist. It is a side project, not a company: there is no team, no funding and nothing to sell you. The full source for this site lives at github.com/Saul-as-a-service/makeqrco.de, so every claim on this page can be checked against the code that serves it.

It exists because most online QR code generators either wrap your link in a tracking redirect that can expire, gate the download behind an account, or stamp a watermark on the result. This one does none of those things, and the reason it can afford not to is that it costs almost nothing to run.

Bugs, feature requests and corrections are welcome as GitHub issues, or by email at hello@makeqrco.de.

What is and is not collected

No accounts

No sign-up, no login, no user database. There is nothing stored about you to breach.

Cookieless analytics

Site pages load a cookieless script from api.panalytics.money, which counts page views, referrers, campaign tags and countries in aggregate. No cookies, no cross-site identifier. The share pages under makeqrco.de/<url> deliberately do not load it.

No stored payloads

The image API renders on request and returns the PNG. The encoded URL is not written to a database or a file by this application.

The full detail, including what the analytics records and what standard web-server logging can see, is in the privacy policy.

Guides

The same reasoning applied to the codes themselves: what actually decides whether one scans, written up properly.

All QR code and barcode guides →

Create a QR code