The choice families usually think they are making is between a QR code and no QR code. That is not the real decision.
The real decision, when you sit down with a mason and realise the standard inscription says almost nothing, is between paying for more carved letters and putting the rest somewhere else. Both cost money. They buy very different things.
What extra letters cost
Memorial masons generally charge per letter or per line, and rates vary by region, stone and lettering style. A few pounds per character is common, so a single extra line of verse can add anywhere from around £50 to well over £150.
Two points that catch people out.
Adding an inscription later costs far more than adding it now. A later addition often means the memorial being removed and taken to the workshop, or a mason attending on site, plus in many cemeteries a fresh permit. A line that would have cost £80 as part of the original order can cost several hundred as a return visit.
The regulations may cap it anyway. Many churchyard regulations restrict inscription length and require wording to be approved in advance, so "just add more" is not always available at any price. See the churchyard guide.
What each one is genuinely good at
Carved stone
Permanence. Nothing else on this page has a thousand-year track record. A carved inscription needs no company, no server, no electricity and no password.
It works for everyone. No phone, no signal, no battery, no interest in technology. A visitor with none of those still reads the name.
Dignity. Cut lettering in stone looks like what it is. Most people want that, and want it to be the thing seen first.
Its limits: expensive per word, capped by regulation and by the physical size of the stone, and completely unchangeable. An error is permanent. So is a phrasing you come to dislike.
A memorial page behind a code
Volume. There is no per-word cost. Two hundred photographs cost the same as one.
Things stone cannot hold at all. Voice recordings, video, other people's memories added over years. A voice is the thing families lose fastest and grieve twice, and there is no way to carve one.
It can be corrected and extended. Facts get remembered wrongly in the first weeks. A page can be fixed. A stone cannot.
Its limits: it depends on a company continuing to exist, needs mobile signal to load, and can be edited by whoever holds the password, which is precisely why some churchyard authorities object to it. Honest treatment of all three in how memorial QR codes work.
The comparison in money
Suppose you have around £80 to spend beyond the basic inscription.
Spent on lettering, that is roughly one additional short line. "A wonderful husband, father and grandfather." True, dignified, and it tells a stranger in 2085 nothing whatsoever about the man.
Spent on a plaque and page, that is the photographs, the stories, his voice, and whatever forty other people remember about him, with no limit and no per-word charge.
That is not an argument for skipping the inscription. It is an argument about which of the two is the better use of the marginal eighty pounds, and we would say it is not close.
What we would actually advise
Do both, and keep the stone short.
Spend on getting the carved inscription right rather than long. A name as people actually said it, the dates, and one true line. Good lettering, well cut, correctly spelled, with room left if a spouse may later share the memorial.
Then put everything that would not fit behind the code, where it costs nothing per word and can grow for as long as anyone is adding to it.
This is also the version most likely to be approved. Authorities and incumbents object to prominence and to modern-looking clutter, not to a small discreet disc beside a traditional inscription.
The practical sequence
If the memorial has not been commissioned yet, tell the mason at the first meeting that you want a small plaque included. It goes into one permit application, gets fitted in one visit, and costs a fraction of coming back later. There is a full walkthrough in how to set up a memorial QR code.
And whichever you choose, proofread the carved part twice, against the death certificate rather than against memory. The page can be corrected. The stone cannot. Wording ideas and the mistakes that cannot be undone are in the inscription guide.