Affordable yet powerful Bitly Alternative

[gilcollect]

I built a URL shortener - Hop2 - that helps you understand your customers through detailed logs about link clicks.

Not only that you can track every click (visitor's location, device, operating system, ...) but you can also generate QR codes, protect your links with a password, redirect visitors based on their country, A/B test, and more.

How is this different from Bitly? Bitly costs at least 5 times more. They do not offer features like A/B testing or password protection and they put a bitly logo on your QR codes.

I’m looking for all kinds of feedback and suggestions.

 

[kkaiser85]

@gilcollect Hi, I signed up & tried it out. It looks great! I'm a developer & have used bitly extensively across many different projects. Hopefully, the feedback helps.

1) I don't see any documentation for an API, but without one, I think it will be pretty hard to get people to adopt the service. Processing shortlinks manually is very time-consuming & unlikely to be used by most people or companies.

2) Bitly has pretty solid classifications. They use the standard UTM Source, Medium & Campaign which are encoded as query parameters & they also have tags that are only visible within their system. These tools wind up being essential when attempting to understand trends across groupings of links.

3) I think your website will benefit from something like statuspage.io. The issue with redirect services (or similar) is that they have to have 100% uptime. Your client is trusting that if they give you a URL now, that the website won't fail to redirect that URL or take 10+ seconds to do so resulting in the end-user clicking

X

. Saving ~$20/month would be good, but that sort of downtime is capable of resulting in much more than that in losses. The service seems to work well, but I think you'll have an easier time convincing people if there were a third-party auditor of your site's stability like Atlassian/statuspage.