About
Links rot. Ours don't.
Shortner URL exists because of a quiet, universal problem: the web's links decay. Pages move, campaigns end, platforms reorganize — and every link that pointed at them dies without a sound.
The problem
Anyone who's shared links for a few years has felt it. The article you cited is a 404. The offer page in last year's newsletter goes to nothing. The URL on a thousand printed flyers points at a site that got restructured. Studies of the web consistently find that a large share of links stop working within a few years of being published — and once a link is distributed, you can't recall it.
The standard fix is discipline nobody has: keep a spreadsheet of every link you've shared, audit it quarterly, update content everywhere it appears. The practical fix is indirection: share a link you control, and keep the destination current behind it.
That's the whole product. A short, stable address; an editable route; and a library that keeps it all on file.
Operating principles
Four commitments
Written down so you can hold us to them.
No link rot
Links don't expire and slugs are never recycled. A deleted slug is retired, not resold — a link you killed can't be revived by a stranger and pointed somewhere you'd never send people.
No hostage pricing
When paid tiers launch, they'll charge for new capability — analytics, export, teams, domains. They will not charge you to keep links you already filed working.
No interstitials, ever
No ad pages, no countdown timers, no "continue to site" buttons between a click and its destination. A redirect service that taxes its own clicks isn't infrastructure; it's a toll booth.
Clean domain, defended
Abuse gets removed. A short domain's reputation with browsers and spam filters is a shared resource for everyone using it — we treat protecting it as a core feature, not an afterthought.
Where we are
Honestly: early
Shortner URL opened for early access in November 2026. It's built and run by a small independent team, and the feature set is deliberately narrow while the foundation hardens: shorten, route, file. The roadmap shows what's next, in order, and early users have a disproportionate say in it — when something's missing or broken, tell us and it moves up the list.
Be early. It has perks.
The good slugs are still free, and the roadmap is still listening.