Why we gave 15 dynamic QRs away on the free tier.
The market norm is 0–3. We picked 15. Here's the reasoning, the math, and what we got wrong on the first guess.
When we set our free tier limit at 15 dynamic QR codes, every advisor told us we were giving away too much. The market average is 1-3. Bitly Free has 2. QR TIGER's free trial is 3. We picked 15.
Here's the reasoning, what the math says now (after three months of public data), and what we got wrong on the first guess.
Photo: DS stories on Pexels
The reasoning
Three things we believed at launch.
The smallest restaurant has 5-8 use cases. Sarah's diner uses 8. The local pizza shop has 4-5. A 30-table restaurant probably has 8-10. If our free tier is 1-3 codes, we exclude the entire small restaurant use case — which is the use case we built the product for.
Generosity is a competitive moat. It's much harder for a competitor to "just match our free tier" if our free tier is large. Free tier wars are usually won by the most generous side, but only if generosity is sustainable.
Conversion to Pro happens for emotional reasons, not feature gates. People upgrade because they trust the product, not because they hit a paywall. A free tier that lets users prove value first creates better-converting Pro users.
The math
After three months of public availability, here's what we see:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Of paying users with <8 dynamic codes | 62% |
| Hit the 15-code limit and upgrade | 14% |
| Use 8-15 and stay on free | 24% |
The interesting number is the 24%. These are users who fully use the free tier (8-15 codes) but don't upgrade. Some of them probably won't ever upgrade — they got what they need from free. Some of them will upgrade later, when they outgrow it.
The 14% who hit the cap and upgrade is healthy. They're paying for unlimited dynamic, smart redirects, and the custom domain. They're our best customers, partly because they fully experienced the product before paying.
What we got wrong
We initially thought the free tier would lead to high churn — people would create QRs, use them once, and abandon the account. The signup-to-active-user pipeline would be leaky.
Wrong. The opposite happened. People who created QRs on free tend to keep using them indefinitely. The QRs printed on table tents stay on table tents. Once the QR is printed, the user has a permanent reason to maintain the dynamic redirect.
This means our active-user-to-paying-user funnel has long latency. Someone signs up in March, prints their QR in April, gets value for 6 months, and finally upgrades to Pro in October when they need a 16th QR or want analytics.
That's slow conversion — but it's high-quality conversion. Users who arrive via the long path are 4× less likely to churn than users who upgrade in their first week.
What about abuse?
Concern: someone signs up, creates 15 dynamic codes, and uses them for spam (phishing, scams, click farming).
Mitigation:
- Rate-limit new account creation by IP and email domain
- Run every dynamic destination URL through Google Safe Browsing API
- Auto-suspend any code with 10x the normal scan velocity (likely click farming)
- Email verification before issuing dynamic codes
We've only had to manually intervene 3 times in 12 months. Two of those were obvious phishing (links to fake bank login pages) caught by Safe Browsing within hours of creation. One was a click-farming setup we caught via velocity anomaly.
The economics work because abuse costs us very little — a dynamic code uses ~0.5MB of database storage and pennies of bandwidth. Even a spammer creating 15 codes only costs us a few cents per month while we're scrubbing them.
"Free tier abuse is a tax. Generous free tiers pay it. Stingy free tiers create the problem they're trying to avoid."
Where we'd push further
Honestly: we're considering raising the free limit to 20.
The 14% conversion rate at 15 codes is healthy — but it's mostly "hit a hard cap and upgrade." If we raised to 20, we'd lose maybe 30% of that conversion. But we'd capture more of the 24% who currently sit at 8-15 codes and never convert. They might convert at 18-20 if they had the headroom to grow into.
We're testing this internally. If the data supports it, we'll bump it.
The principle: a free tier that's "just barely enough" is a feature gate. A free tier that's "comfortably enough" creates loyal users. We picked the latter, and three months in, we'd pick it again.