In 2023, Bitly's free plan gave you 100 links per month with full analytics.

In 2025, they slashed it to 5 links per month. Five. And they started showing full-screen interstitial ads before redirecting — even on links you created years ago.

In 2026, their cheapest paid plan is $10/month — just to shorten links without ads.

I was paying $120/year to turn long URLs into short ones. A problem that takes 3 lines of code to solve.

So I solved it myself. For free. Forever.