We initially launched our free barcode generation API at Barcodes4.me back in 2008. Unfortunately, as of January 1st, 2021, the service has been discontinued.
We're sad about this too. We launched the service to solve our own need in December of 2008. Given the introduction of some great open-source barcode libraries, we haven't needed to use it for quite some time. We've continued to operate it for free for all of you, and even did a complete overhaul of the application a few years back. It's been a labor of love for us, and we're glad to have been able to enable the functionality for your business.
Over time the service has become unsustainably popular. As it grows in popularity, our costs to operate it have also increased.
Unfortunately not. We've explored commercializing this product, however with the great open-source libraries mentioned above, we determined such an offering wasn’t economically feasible.
Any live connection to our API will stop functioning when the service is sunset. If your document archive is generating barcodes on demand, those will no longer generate. If you have cached the generated image locally, then your cache will still exist.
We know many of you have included barcodes as image tags in your outgoing HTML emails. Those images will stop working when the service is sunset.
We know many of you have built applications or extensions (Wordpress plugins) that use our service. Your customers may use our product without knowing it. We don't know who those people are, and won't receive this notification.
Consider that you may need to issue an update to your product, and notify your customers about the update, in order to keep the service running.
We know you may have more questions about this. Please understand that this service has been offered for free to hundreds of thousands of users, and we simply cannot respond to all of your inquiries.
From our whole team, we wish you a great holiday season and prosperous 2021.