[DHowett]

The real WTF is... Almost free? Like, they found a company that will, what, sell you an image of black and white boxes for mere pennies? God, imagine the money they could make swindling companies with a per-scan advertising fee! Pixels will be mined like gold!

Apparently nobody in Corporate has heard of a free online barcode generator. You can even print the barcode as many times as you want! Maybe they just do not trust free services?

[jarek]

I imagine it's the tracking and statistics provided by paid services that is the really useful point from business point of view. Marketing people love response tracking.

[corin_]

Nope, in this case it was the creating of QR codes for printing. Don't worry, I did laugh pretty hard right in front of them and told them that it's easy to make them absolutely free - ah well, they'd already paid at this point.

[Scotchy]

Well you can still track how many people scan it, right ? e.g. by providing a proxy link ?

[corin_]

Yeah sure - plenty of people do QR codes that go through bit.ly, just as possible to do it through any other tracking platform.

[crisnoble]

bitly provides qr codes for every link generated with their service. Just go to the info page. ex: https://bitly.com/FPUVjU+

[mopoke]

As, indeed, they should. If you don't track something, how do you know if it's effective? Measure everything you can.