The Link Shortener Shakedown

A short link does one thing. Someone clicks it. A server checks a table: "short code abc123 maps to https://your-actual-long-url.com/page." The server sends a redirect. The browser goes to the real URL.

That's the entire product. A database lookup and a redirect. Four milliseconds of computation. One of the simplest operations a server can perform.

Bitly charges $348/year for this.

What a URL shortener actually does

1. A user clicks short.link/abc123
2. The server looks up abc123 in a key-value store
3. It finds the destination URL
4. It responds with an HTTP 301 or 302 redirect
5. The browser goes to the real URL

Steps 2 through 4 take about 4 milliseconds on modern infrastructure. On Cloudflare Workers, a key-value lookup costs $0.50 per million reads. A single redirect costs roughly $0.0000005. Half a millionth of a dollar.

The analytics features that paid plans offer (click counts, geographic data, device breakdowns, UTM tracking) are just metadata logged during step 2. This adds basically nothing to an already negligible cost.

What Bitly charges

Bitly has raised $80 million+ in venture capital. It's also the parent company of QR Code Generator Pro, the QR tool with 9,000+ Trustpilot reviews at 1.5 stars.

The free tier is capped at 10 links per month. That pushes anyone with regular use toward paid plans immediately.

Everyone else

Rebrandly: $89 to $499/year. Short.io: $240 to $600/year. TinyURL, which was free for nearly two decades, now has paid plans at $120 to $600/year. Dub.co: $288/year for Pro.

The Linktree connection

Linktree raised $167 million and hit a $1.3 billion valuation in 2022. The product is a single HTML page with a profile picture and a list of links. Hosting a static HTML page on Cloudflare costs $0.00.

Linktree Pro costs $60/year. Premium is $180/year. The free plan forces Linktree branding and takes a 12% commission on every digital product sale. A creator making $1,000/month through Linktree's free plan pays $1,440/year in fees for what is architecturally a static HTML page with a Stripe integration.

Linktree was created by its founders in six hours. LittleLink (8,000+ GitHub stars) replicates the whole thing as pure HTML/CSS with 100/100 PageSpeed scores.

Who pays for this

Small businesses. A local shop using short links on menus and flyers needs maybe 20 to 50 links total. But Bitly's free tier caps at 10 per month, pushing them to a $96/year plan for redirects that cost nothing to maintain.

Content creators and marketers. The analytics are genuinely useful but they're just metadata logged alongside a redirect. Not a separate product.

Nonprofits. $348/year for a link shortener is a real budget line for organizations that count spending in hundreds.

Anyone with links already in circulation. Once a short link is on a flyer, in a PDF, or shared in a post, leaving the provider means either paying to keep old links alive or accepting that they'll break.

The free alternative

I built nah.tools/links because a database lookup shouldn't cost $348/year.

Custom short links at go.nah.tools/your-alias with click analytics, UTM parameter tracking, QR code generation for each link, and bulk creation via CSV (up to 500 links). No account. No signup. No credit card. No limit on the number of links.

The redirect infrastructure runs on Cloudflare Workers. Cost to me: $5/month for up to 10 million redirects. Source code is MIT-licensed.

How to protect yourself

1. Figure out what you actually need. A handful of short links with basic click counting doesn't require a $348/year plan.
2. Think about link longevity. If short links are going on printed materials, the provider's survival matters. Open-source and self-hostable options give you control.
3. Custom domains don't need a paid plan. Branded short links require a one-time DNS configuration, not a monthly fee.
4. UTM parameters are free. Campaign tracking through UTM parameters is a URL convention, not a product feature.
5. Check what happens when you stop paying. If existing links break when you cancel, you're not paying for a tool. You're paying rent on your own URLs.

A URL redirect is the web equivalent of a forwarding address at the post office. It takes a fraction of a second, costs a fraction of a penny, and requires a fraction of the infrastructure these companies charge for.