URL Shorteners 2026: What the Free Plans Let You Do Without an Account

The roundup I would hand somebody is Zapier’s. It says how it was made, the writer spent time with close to fifty tools, and Zapier has no shortener of its own to sell you. Like most of them, it is built for somebody picking a paid plan: branded domains, retargeting, attribution, seats.

That is not the question most people arrive with. The question is whether you can paste a long link into a box and get a short one back, right now, without making an account, and what that costs you later.

I built one of these this month, so I went and read the free column on every vendor page. Everything below came off those pages, a vendor help article, or a response header I pulled myself, on 24 August 2026.

The free column, side by side

	Sign up?	Free links	Pick your own ending	Take one down later	Click stats
Snip	No	50 a day per address	No	Yes, with a key	No
is.gd	No	200 an hour per address	Yes	No, ever	Opt in per link
TinyURL	Not to shorten	30 a month	Yes	No, not on Free	No
Bitly	Yes	5 a month	3 a month	Only if never edited	Yes
Short.io	Yes	1,000 total	Yes	Yes	50,000 clicks a month
Dub	Yes	25 a month	Yes	Yes	1,000 events a month

Two of those cells need a note. Bitly states its free quotas by the year, as 60 links and 36 custom back-halves, which is where the monthly numbers come from. is.gd counts by the hour instead, and publishes the whole table: 200 shortenings an hour per address, or 100 if you turn statistics on, which they work out to 4,800 a day for you, while noting that the daily figure is their arithmetic rather than a second limit.

Two of them will not let you delete a link

This is the row I did not expect, and it is the one worth reading twice.

is.gd says it plainly on its FAQ: asked whether you can delete a link or point it somewhere else, the answer is no, because “our shortened links are permanent once created.” Their reason is abuse. If creators could repoint a link, a spammer would register something harmless and swap the destination a week later.

TinyURL does not say it anywhere near the box you paste into. It is in the feature grid on the pricing page, where Delete Links and Edit Link Destinations are both marked off for Free and on for Pro. Free gets to make 30 links a month and choose their endings. Getting rid of one costs $9 a month on an annual plan.

Bitly will delete, with conditions. Its help article says a link can be deleted only if it has never been edited or redirected, and only by a Group or Account Admin. Otherwise you hide it, and hiding keeps it working for anyone who clicks.

So the pattern is not what you would guess. The services that make you sign up will usually let you clean up. The ones that ask for nothing mostly keep your link forever, and the one paid tier you might buy for that reason costs more than the shortener.

Snip’s answer, and what it costs

Snip gives you a delete key when it gives you the link. It is shown once, on the same screen, and there is a box further down the page that takes the short link plus the key and removes it. No account, nothing to install.

Two honest costs come with that. The key is not recoverable, because there is no account to recover it into, so the page says so at the moment it hands the key over rather than in a FAQ. And a removed link can keep redirecting for up to a minute before it is gone at every location.

The reason it goes at all is a three digit number nobody sees. A short link is answered with a redirect, and the code says whether browsers may keep a copy. Snip answers 302, temporary, keep nothing. Bit.ly answers 301, permanent, then adds a header capping the browser’s copy at ninety seconds, because an uncapped 301 can sit in a browser cache more or less forever and keep delivering people to a link its owner already killed. Both of us are solving the same problem. I would rather not create it.

That single decision is also why is.gd’s objection does not apply here. Repointing a link is the bait and switch they are guarding against. Snip cannot repoint anything, only stop it, and stopping cannot send anybody anywhere.

Three numbers worth rechecking

Zapier’s page was last updated in May 2026, and free plans drift. Three figures that get quoted everywhere, there and elsewhere, read differently on the vendor pages this week.

TinyURL is usually called unlimited and account free. That is true of the anonymous box on the front page and not of the Free plan. Sign in and the plan table gives you 30 links a month, no analytics, and no delete. Pro is $9 a month billed annually, or $11 month to month.

Short.io’s free plan reads as 1,000 links a month almost everywhere. Its pricing page says “Branded links total: 1,000”, a lifetime figure. The 50,000 tracked clicks renew every month. The links do not.

Rebrandly’s free plan gets quoted at 100 tracked clicks and a custom domain. The pricing page now says unlimited clicks, and the domain is “1 Custom Domain (Yourbrand.bio)”, a subdomain Rebrandly hands you rather than one you registered.

Snip’s 50 a day is the tightest cap in the table by a wide margin, roughly a hundredth of what is.gd allows, and it is a per address cap on a much smaller shared pool. The Workers free plan this runs on allows 1,000 writes a day and creating a link is exactly one, so a thousand new links is the whole service’s day, for everybody. When that pool empties, new links stop and every link that already exists keeps working. I wrote about the two layers it took to hold that line separately.

What Snip does not do

No custom domain, which is the real answer to a shortener shutting down. goo.gl stopped answering links that had gone quiet on 25 August 2025, and git.io stopped redirecting every link it had ever made on 29 April 2022. Links on a domain you own survive that. Links on mine do not, and I would rather write it here than let you find out.

No click counts, no custom endings, no editing, no bulk mode. The endings are random on purpose: snipp.cc/paypal, on a domain with no accounts behind it, is how a shortener gets on a blocklist and takes every other link on the host with it.

It is free today and needs no account today. That is a description of where things stand, not a promise. Running it costs something, and if a paid tier or a lower cap becomes necessary, the tool’s page will say so before it happens.

The column nobody prints

Links per month is in every table. Undo is in none of them, and it is the one you go looking for on the worst day, in a hurry, about a link that is already in somebody else’s inbox.