I am Norbert founder of QRCode-Monkey.com and co-founder of LineUpr.com. I developed the first version of QRCode Monkey in 2012 when I first saw QR codes being used around me. Back then I thought those black and white codes tell you nothing about the content behind it and I started developing a QR code generator that could easily embed logos to give the codes more “meaning”. This feature somehow made the site very popular over the years and I added more design options to customize the look of the QR code. We do have thousands of users every day by now and I started to professionalize the website with features for companies like our API or QRCode Studio which is a management tool for dynamic QR codes.
Our QRCode Monkey API basically offers the functionality to generate custom QR code images which you can create on our website with an easy to use UI. You can create a QR code with custom design and color, Add a logo or use different shapes to draw the QR code.
The API is popular because of the customization options we offer compared to other APIs, we also allow to export those designed QR codes into all important formats like PNG, SVG, EPS and PDF.
The official documentation can be found here: https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/qr-code-api-with-logo
The API can be consumed via RapidAPI where you will find the pricing: https://rapidapi.com/qrcode-monkey/api/custom-qr-code-with-logo
The API is paid because we see value in this solution for professionals, and our website www.qrcode-monkey.com is our free product.
A lot of companies need to bulk generate QR codes for something like business cards, so they use our API to get the job done. We also have several customers that created an app and integrated the QR codes created with our API into the workflow they provide, e.g. QR codes for leads or to pay for something. What we often see is that customers use our QR codes for their inventory, so they stick a QR code on every item they own to track or identify things.
Actually our website has such a good SEO ranking that we do not need to pay for advertisement or similar. We just hope that people like our free QR code generator and if they want the features they see for their own purpose they will look around and find our API and other solutions. So currently we just wait and they are coming. Let's hope this stays the way it is :)
Our website uses our API with more than one million requests per month. The API we offer over RapidAPI varies depending on projects of our customers, so there is no real number here.
Backend is all PHP with some command line tools to convert the created QR codes into different file formats.
We do have some ideas for more customization of the QR codes but no fixed plan to release something. We also think about an API for QRCode Studio, to create dynamic QR codes that you can track.
We integrated Stripe for payments in QRCode Studio and use it for the payment processing, once you get to know Stripe, it is a really handy tool. We also use IPStack for some IP to location data requests to analyze the scans of our dynamic QR codes in QRCode Studio.
Well, it seems like Rapid API is the only solution that makes it easy to monetize an API, to be honest if there were other platforms I would look into them. I am not always happy with the usability for our customers and they had a lot of bugs over the last two years, but let’s hope for optimization in the future :)
Anything else that you would like to add?
I am actually more of a frontend guy developing Javascript based complex UIs, but since the success of QRCode Monkey I dived into the API business, I learned a lot over the years from server setup to caching and so on, so it is always exciting to find new customers and challenges for our API.
