Bitly is $35/mo (Growth). Lasso is a self-hosted alternative at $0.99/mo. Here's when each makes sense.
| Lasso | Bitly | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Self-hosted, your infra | Managed SaaS (cloud only) |
| Data location | Your server, your disk | Bitly's cloud |
| Free tier | 50 links | Paid only |
| Pro pricing | $0.99/mo | $35/mo (Growth) |
| Dependencies | None (single binary + SQLite) | N/A (managed) |
| Setup time | ~30 seconds | Account signup |
| Dashboard | Built-in at /ui | Cloud dashboard |
| License | BSL 1.1 | Proprietary SaaS |
Lasso is a single Go binary with embedded SQLite. Install it with one command, and you are running in under a minute. Your data stays on your server.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/lasso/install.sh | sh
Bitly is a strong product. There is no point pretending otherwise. Where Lasso earns its place is in situations where Bitly cannot be used — airgapped environments, regulated industries, teams with strict data sovereignty requirements, or simply developers who prefer tools they can inspect end to end. If none of those constraints apply, Bitly may genuinely be the better choice.
Architecturally, Lasso and Bitly could not be more different. Bitly runs on distributed cloud infrastructure with load balancers, managed databases, CDNs, and redundancy across availability zones. Lasso is a single process writing to a single file on a single disk. That sounds fragile until you realize that SQLite handles more concurrent readers than most web applications will ever need, and WAL mode means reads never block writes.
The migration path from Bitly depends on how much history you need to bring over. If you only need active records, a manual re-entry through Lasso's dashboard might be faster than writing a migration script. If you need full history, export from Bitly and use Lasso's POST API to import records. Either way, the process is measured in hours, not weeks.
Single binary. Free to start. $0.99/mo for Pro.