What it really costs to run a link shortener (spoiler: cents)

Bitly charges $35 per month for its basic paid plan. Let's see what exactly those $35 buy: redirects (301/302), a click counter, some charts, QR codes.

Now let's do the math of what that actually costs to serve. Real numbers, from the real architecture of Link, our shortener.

What a redirect is, technically

A request hits yourdomain/launch. The server runs a SELECT on a database, writes an INSERT for the click, and returns a ~300-byte response with a Location header.

That's it. It's probably the lightest workload on the web. No video, no images, no compute. It's reading one row and answering.

The math, no tricks

Assume a heavy user: 50 active links, 100,000 clicks per month.

• Compute. 100,000 monthly requests are ~2.3 requests per minute. A $5/month VPS (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM) handles hundreds of requests per second for this. You're using under 2% of the machine. Real allocated cost: $0.10/month.
• Database. SQLite on the same VPS. 100,000 clicks are 100,000 small rows: ~20MB per month. In a year, 240MB. The VPS's 25GB disk covers a decade. Cost: $0.
• Bandwidth. 300 bytes per redirect plus the analytics page you look at. Under 100MB per month. The VPS includes 1TB. Cost: $0.
• Backups. Weekly snapshot: ~$0.50/month.

Total: under $1 per month. And if you have 10,000 clicks instead of 100,000, under $0.20.

So what are the $35?

Not infrastructure. They're:

• The pretty short domain (which you can also have: they cost $10/year).
• The sales team.
• The 3,400% margin.

When something costs 35 times its cost, you're not buying technology. You're buying the absence of an alternative. Until there's an alternative.

Our commitment

With Link, the software is free and open source: download it and run it on that $5 VPS, yours forever. And if you want us to run it for you, with login, backups and uptime, you pay what the cloud costs. At cost. With this same open math.

Bits are free. Now prices are starting to be too.