I wanted two things: short links under my own brand (every link I share points traffic back to my site), and a real excuse to run a complete system on the edge — DNS, distributed compute, storage, auth and a dashboard — in production, at zero infrastructure cost.
The result is flino.link: a shortener that responds in under 10 ms from 300+ locations, runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier, and whose only expense is the domain: $4.68 a year. This post covers the design decisions, which is where the interesting parts are.
The architecture in 30 seconds
A single Cloudflare Worker serves the whole domain:
GET /<slug> — the hot path. One read from Workers KV (globally replicated) and a 302 redirect. Nothing else touches that path.
