Most people who go looking for a Bitly alternative are not shopping for features. They have looked at the invoice and thought: I am paying a monthly fee to shorten links that point at my own website.
That instinct is right. But switching badly can cost you more than staying, so here is what to check before you move.
1. What happens to your existing links?
This is the one that catches people out, and it is worth more than every other question combined.
Short links are not really links. They are redirects — a promise that when someone types a short address, something answers and sends them onward. If nothing answers, the link is dead. Not slow, not degraded. Dead.
So every short link you have ever printed on a leaflet, put in an email footer, added to a slide deck or stuck on a QR code depends on somebody keeping that promise. If you stop paying, the promise ends. It does not matter that you own the destination website — the short link in the middle is theirs.
Before you switch, list the places your old links physically exist that you cannot edit. Printed material. Business cards. QR codes on packaging. Anything already in someone’s inbox. Those are the ones that will hurt.
2. Are you on your own domain yet?
If your links look like bit.ly/3xK2p, you are in the worst position: those links can only ever be served by Bitly. Moving means abandoning them.
If your links look like go.yourcompany.com/spring, you are in a much better one. That is your domain. You can point it wherever you like, and if the new system keeps the same short codes, every existing link carries on working — the visitor never knows anything changed.
If you take one thing from this article: put your short links on a domain you own, whoever you use. It is the difference between switching and starting again.
3. Can you get your data out?
Two things matter: the list of links and their destinations, and the click history.
The link list you must have, or you cannot rebuild anything. Export it before you cancel, not after. The click history is usually nice to have rather than essential, but if you report on it to anyone, export that too.
Check what format you get. A CSV you can read is worth more than a fancy dashboard you cannot take with you.
4. What is the five-year cost, not the monthly one?
Monthly pricing is designed to feel small. Multiply it out.
A $29-a-month plan is $348 a year. Over five years that is $1,740 — for redirecting visitors to a website you already pay to host. And that assumes the price never goes up, which it will.
Now do the same sum for the alternative you are considering. If it is another subscription, you have not solved the problem. You have changed who sends the invoice.
5. Who can see your visitors?
Every click on a short link passes through somebody’s server, and that somebody can see who clicked, from where, and when. With a hosted service, that somebody is them.
For most businesses that is merely untidy. If you work in health, law, finance or anything where you have promised customers their data stays in one place, it is a genuine problem — and one that is hard to answer honestly on a data protection questionnaire.
The three kinds of alternative
Another hosted service
Rebrandly, Short.io, Dub and others. Easiest to move to, and genuinely good products. But you are still renting, still paying monthly, and your links still stop the day you stop.
Free and self-hosted
There are excellent free options. Shlink is the best known, it is open source under the MIT licence, and it costs nothing. If you are comfortable with a server and a command line, you can be running in an evening and you will never pay anyone.
We will say plainly what most companies in our position would not: if that describes you, do that. It is a fine answer.
Self-hosted, but finished
The gap in the free options is not the shortening. It is everything around it: password-protected links, splitting traffic to test two pages, QR codes you can style and print, a screen that is pleasant to use, and someone to ask when it breaks.
That gap is why Kortli exists. It is Shlink underneath, with the missing pieces built on top, installed with one command, for one payment instead of a subscription. We are not going to pretend the engine is ours.
A short checklist
- Export your links before you cancel anything.
- Move to a domain you own, and keep the same short codes.
- Work out the five-year cost of anything you are about to sign up to.
- Test a handful of real links before you switch the domain over.
- Keep the old account running for a month afterwards. It is cheap insurance.
Switching a link shortener is not hard. Switching it badly is expensive, and you usually find out months later when someone tells you a QR code on a poster goes nowhere.
Take the hour. Export first.
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