You are not alone. Bitly is designed for enterprise budgets. If you are a startup or small team, there is a simpler option.
Bitly free gives you 10 links/mo with bit.ly branding. Core is $8/mo for 100 links. Growth is $35/mo for 500 links. Premium is $300/mo. Per-link limits apply at every tier.
For an enterprise team with a large budget and complex requirements, Bitly is probably worth it. For everyone else, the math does not work.
Lasso is a self-hosted link shortener tool. Single Go binary, embedded SQLite, running in 30 seconds. Free tier: 50 links. Pro: $0.99/mo/mo.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/lasso/install.sh | sh
| Lasso | Bitly | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $0.99/mo/mo flat | $35/mo |
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Cloud only |
| Free tier | 50 links | Limited |
| Setup time | 30 seconds | Account + config |
| Dependencies | None (single binary) | N/A (managed) |
| Data location | Your server | Their cloud |
Lasso does not have Bitly's brand recognition — bit.ly links are universally recognized. It does not have link-in-bio pages, QR code branding options, or enterprise reporting. If the bit.ly brand matters to your marketing, Bitly is worth the premium.
Free tier included. No credit card required.
Bitly's pricing tiers are structured to push teams toward the Growth plan at $35 per month. The free tier caps you at 10 links, which is enough for about two days of actual marketing work. Core at $8 per month bumps that to 100 links but still forces bit.ly branding. Custom domains — the feature most teams actually need — start at Growth tier. For a small agency managing links across multiple campaigns and clients, Bitly's annual cost easily exceeds $400 before accounting for the per-link overage charges that kick in when you exceed your tier.
The deeper problem is dependency. Every link you create with Bitly is a redirect through their infrastructure. If Bitly has an outage, your links stop working. If Bitly changes their pricing again — and they have, multiple times — you either pay more or lose your existing short links. Self-hosted link shortening means your redirects run on your server, and the only infrastructure dependency is one you control.