Getting started

Open the Kilo dashboard and sign in. There is no password to invent: you sign in with Google or with a passkey - the fingerprint, face, or device PIN you already use to unlock your phone or laptop. A passkey stays on your device and can’t be phished or reused, which is why Kilo offers it alongside Google rather than a stored password.

Your account is an organization from the first second, even if it’s just you. That’s what lets you invite teammates later without migrating anything - the workspace, its links, and its analytics are already shaped for more than one person.

In the dashboard, choose New link. Paste the destination - the long URL you actually want people to land on - and Kilo mints a short link on the spot, something like qr2r.com/aA3k9. That short link is what you share, print, or turn into a QR code.

The important part is what happens after you share it: the destination isn’t permanently baked into the link. You can edit where it points at any time, and every scan or click from then on follows the new destination. A flyer you printed last month can point somewhere new today without reprinting a thing. That is the whole reason to route a link through Kilo instead of handing out the raw URL.

You can give the link a human name so you recognize it in a list of many, drop it into a group, or leave it as-is. None of that changes the short link people see.

Free on Kilo is a working tier, not a countdown. Two things sit at its core, and neither expires:

Static QR codes are free forever. A static QR encodes your content directly in the pattern - no Kilo link in the middle, no server involved once it’s printed. Because there’s nothing to keep alive, there’s nothing that can lapse. Design one in the QR designer, download it as a PNG or SVG, and it’s yours the way a photograph is yours.

Dynamic links work on the free plan too. The editable, re-routable links from the last step - the ones with analytics behind them - are part of free, not a paid add-on. How many you can keep active at once depends on your plan, and the dashboard shows you that number before you commit to anything. We don’t print a figure here because plans are configurable and we’d rather you read the live one than a stale one.

The way Kilo makes money is the honest way round: you pay when you outgrow free and choose a bigger plan - never because a free link quietly stopped working. A paused link resolves to a branded page that explains itself; it never turns into a dead end.

Every link has its own analytics view in the dashboard. Open a link and you’ll see how many times it was scanned or clicked, where in the world those clicks came from, and what devices and browsers were involved - all in aggregate. Kilo never stores a raw IP address to build that picture; IP-derived data is hashed with a rotating pepper before it ever touches storage, so you get the counts without keeping a trail back to a person.

Give it a minute after the first scan. Analytics are written asynchronously, independently of the redirect, so that the redirect itself stays fast - roughly 50 milliseconds from scan to landing. The numbers catch up a moment later; the person clicking never waits on them.

That’s the whole loop: make a link, share it, change where it goes whenever you need to, and watch what happens. From here, the next guide puts that loop to work on a real job - one printed QR code that sends visitors in each country to a different destination.