About

Last updated 11 November 2026

A QR studio that keeps the code in your hands.

What this is

Pikkola QR makes QR codes in the browser. You choose what goes inside: a link, a Wi-Fi network, plain text, a contact card, an email, a phone number or a text message. You choose how it looks, download it as PNG or SVG, and print a sheet of twelve for stickers. It is the ninth tool from Pikkola, a small studio in Seoul that writes single-purpose pages for the browser.

How the code is built

A QR code is a square grid of dark and light modules with three finder patterns in the corners, a timing line between them, and a small format block that states the error correction level and the mask in use. The text you type is encoded as bytes, prefixed with a mode and a length, padded to fill the chosen version, split into blocks, given Reed-Solomon error correction codewords, interleaved back together and laid into the grid in a two-column zigzag that skips the function patterns.

Eight mask patterns are then tried in turn, each scored by the four penalty rules in the standard: runs of the same colour, solid 2 by 2 blocks, finder-like sequences, and the balance of dark to light. The lowest score wins, and its number is written into the format block so a scanner can undo it. All of this runs in about five hundred lines of plain JavaScript in one file, following ISO/IEC 18004 and the reference implementation published by Project Nayuki under the MIT licence. No encoder library is fetched from a CDN, and the page's security policy would block one if it tried.

Why there is no redirect

Many QR services put their own short address inside the code rather than yours. That is how they count scans, and how a free trial becomes a monthly bill: the address is theirs, so they can meter it, expire it or forward it somewhere else. The code keeps working exactly as long as they decide it should.

Here the payload is what you typed. A Wi-Fi code carries the network name and password, a contact code carries the vCard, a link code carries the address. Nothing in it points at this site, which is why the code cannot expire and why this page needs no database behind it. The trade is real and worth saying plainly: there are no scan counts, because counting requires a redirect through someone's server. If you need numbers, you need a different kind of service.

What it costs

Nothing. There is no account, no trial, no watermark, no advertisement and no paid tier. Pikkola pays for its domains with a few small field guides about asynchronous work. If a price ever appears on this page it will be printed clearly on the page it belongs to.

The rest of the shelf

• Pikkola Time: a time zone planner that scores the hours everyone can attend.
• Pikkola Diff: a text comparison that uploads neither side.
• Pikkola Rank: a pre-flight check for Korean blog drafts.
• Pikkola Meta: link cards and the meta tags behind them.
• Pikkola Journal: essays on distributed work and browser tooling.
• Pikkola Tools: a hand-checked directory for remote teams.
• Pikkola Invoice: a one-page invoice you print from the browser.
• Pikkola JSON: a formatter, tree viewer and type generator that keeps the document in the tab.

Credits

The encoder follows the QR Code generator library by Project Nayuki, MIT licence. Inter, Pretendard and JetBrains Mono are self-hosted under the SIL Open Font License. The QR Code standard is published by Denso Wave and ISO/IEC as ISO/IEC 18004; the name QR Code is a trademark of Denso Wave.

Contact

Write to hello@pikkola.com. A person reads it, usually within a few days. A report about a code that would not scan is the most useful message you can send.