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After trying various link shorteners, I found Short, which was basic but met my needs.They offer a generous free tier, with no payment until 50,000+ link clicks, which most won't reach.
But I didn’t switch to Short.io because it was a great solution – I did it because it was just adequate enough to do the most basic of redirects. Case in point: I never once used it for reporting because it was a complete mess.
Then I tried Dub and was drawn to how simple/clean the UI/UX was. I switched over from Short and haven't look back. Oh, and I check my analytics in Dub now too as they have much more simple/user-friendly dashboards.
After trying various link shorteners, I found Short, which was basic but met my needs.
But I didn’t switch to Short.io because it was a great solution – I did it because it was just adequate enough to do the most basic of redirects. Case in point: I never once used it for reporting because it was a complete mess.
Then I tried Dub and was drawn to how simple/clean the UI/UX was. I switched over from Short and haven't look back. Oh, and I now regularly check my reporting/analytics in Dub now as they have much more user-friendly dashboards.
Custom URL link shortener
In trying just about every link shortener on the market, in addition to using my own self-hosted solution (twice), I finally landed on Short, and at the time, it was pretty basic, but a solid solution for what I was looking to achieve with it. And I couldn't complain, they have a super generous free tier, for which you don't need to pay until you hit 50,000+ link clicks, which would never be hit for most individuals and businesses.
Rating: D
Rating: C-
They have a pretty basic UI that looks very much like any off the shelf templated dashboard interface. It's nothing special, and looks quite dated in-fact, especially when looking at the reporting.
Rating: D-
This is absolutely what drove us to leave Short in the end. They have such a difficult to use interface that is slow to load and extremely buggy. Simply trying to search or filter down your links to find what you're looking for is incredibly painful.
I think what is most clear here is that a back-end developer built this URL shortener, because the functionality of what it does has been quite solid, it's just interacting with the back-end is just frustrating and unbearable.
Rating: B+
Rating: B+
Rating: B
For the most part, you can get away with just the free tier for most usage. This is a positive and negative though. If they charged more, I think they'd actually be able to hire more engineers and designers to improve the product.
I've been looking for a link shortener that I'd actually enjoy using for over a decade at this point, and while Short is what I landed on the past couple years, I was never actually happy with it, keeping my eyes open the entire time.
Enter Dub, the URL shortener that was made by someone that is not only a super talented product person, but also a full-stack engineer that built it using the most modern tech stack. After using Dub, it's difficult to go back to a tool like Short.
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