Is Bitly free? What you get at $0 and what costs money

Is Bitly free? Yes, up to a point. The free plan costs $0, needs no credit card and has no time limit, and it allows 5 short links and 2 QR codes a month.

It also routes your links through a preview page with an ad, reports no click counts and takes no custom domain. Counting clicks begins on Core, which costs $10 a month billed as $120 once a year.

I run TrackRev, which competes with Bitly. Every Bitly figure below comes from Bitly's own pricing, blog and help pages, read in October 2026.

Is Bitly free? What the free plan includes

According to Bitly's free-plan article, links made on the free plan do not expire. You do need an account. Wikipedia dates the end of guest link creation to November 2023.

Bitly free plan limits to know before you share a link

Free links show an ad

Bitly says it uses ads on free accounts to keep the free plans free. A visitor who taps a free link lands on an interstitial page that shows a preview of the destination and an advertisement.

The help center article, updated January 12, 2026, points anyone who wants links without ads to a paid plan, and the sign-up page for the tier is headed "Free With ads".

Links created with the discontinued no-account shortener keep the ad until you recreate them in a paid account, and Bitly's anonymous-link FAQ says the fix is a new link to the same destination, because the old ones cannot be managed or redirected.

Anything already printed or posted on one of those links stays on the ad page until you replace it.

No click or scan analytics

The free-plan article says the plan tracks views of your Pages but includes no click or scan analytics for short links or QR codes. Counting begins on Core, with 30 days of click and scan history.

Growth keeps 4 months, Premium 1 year and Enterprise 2 years, which caps how far back a campaign review can reach.

The monthly cap and what counts toward it

Per Bitly's help center, limits reset to zero at midnight UTC at the end of each calendar month, so 5 links a month tops out at 60 a year.

The monthly limits article counts QR codes and Pages links toward the short-link limit and says redirects count too.

The pricing page lists QR codes on their own line, so confirm how your account counts them on its billing and usage page. Once you reach the cap, you cannot shorten or redirect links until the next month starts.

A free link cannot be redirected

Bitly's pricing page lists redirects from Core upward, at 5 a month there, so a free-plan link keeps its destination for good.

A mistyped destination, or a page you move later, means a new link and a reprint if the old one is on paper.

Bitly pricing: what each paid plan adds

Core adds the UTM builder and Bitly Assist, an AI feature for creating links and reading performance.

Branded links on one complimentary custom domain arrive with Growth (what a branded short link is), along with bulk creation of 100 links per upload.

Premium raises that to 3,000 and brings city-level and device data, campaign-level tracking and mobile deep linking. Enterprise is a custom quote with multiple users, SSO, webhooks, 99.99% uptime and 2 years of click data.

Yearly billing takes Growth from $420 over twelve months at the monthly rate to $348, a $72 saving of 17%. Premium falls from $3,600 to $2,388, a $1,212 saving that matches the 34% Bitly advertises as its best case.

Core has no monthly option, so the cheapest way in is a $120 charge up front.

Per link at full use, Growth is the cheapest paid tier: $348 for 6,000 links a year is about 6 cents each, against 10 cents on Core ($120 for 1,200) and about 7 cents on Premium ($2,388 for 36,000).

Take a team that tags 4 links for each of 12 campaigns a month, which is 48 short links. The free plan covers 5 of them, about a tenth.

Core's 100 leaves 52 spare for $120 a year, and the 500 on Growth only pay off if a branded domain matters.

What Bitly is used for

Bitly is a URL shortener and link management platform, as Wikipedia describes it. The company dates to 2008, and bit.ly became Twitter's default shortener on May 6, 2009 before t.co replaced it.

Character limits no longer explain why people shorten links: X's documentation counts every URL as 23 of a post's 280 characters, whatever its length.

Free and cheaper Bitly alternatives

Bitly's free plan takes no custom domain, while Short.io's takes up to 5, Dub's 3 and Rebrandly's 1. 6 Bitly alternatives ranks the wider field and Bitly vs TrackRev sets the two side by side.

Short.io's free plan is the nearest swap for someone leaving Bitly over the limits above. Free accounts get 5 custom domains, 1,000 branded links over the account's life and statistics on 50,000 clicks, though registering the domain is on you.

The comparison table words the clicks as a monthly figure and an FAQ on the same page says free users see detailed statistics for the first 50,000 clicks, so check which applies.

Hobby is $5 a month with 2,500 branded links and 100,000 tracked clicks, and Pro at $18 a month lifts both caps. Every paid plan starts with a 7-day trial.

Rebrandly's free plan gives 10 links and 10 QR codes a month plus one custom domain, with watermarked QR codes and detailed data on 100 clicks. Essentials raises that to 250 links and 10,000 clicks.

Its page shows different Essentials prices to different visitors, $8 and $11 a month in what I saw, so confirm the figure at checkout.

Dub's link plans start with a free tier of 25 new links and 1,000 tracked events a month, 3 custom domains, QR codes and 30 days of analytics.

Pro is $30 a month for 1,000 new links and 50,000 events, and Business is $90 for 10,000 links and 250,000 events.

Dub's default pricing view shows its partner-program plans, so the $90 headline there is not the link-shortener entry price.

TrackRev's free plan

The free plan caps a workspace at 50 links in total and tracked events at 1,000 a month, and it includes last-touch attribution, QR codes and the UTM builder. Revenue figures stay hidden until a paid plan.

TrackRev puts no ad on your links.

Paid plans start at Starter, $39 a month or $351 a year (nine months at $39), and every paid plan includes unlimited links and events, and revenue sync from Stripe, Paddle, Polar and Lemon Squeezy.

Growth at $99 and Scale at $199 differ on workspaces and affiliate commission volume (pricing).

That revenue sync is the gap Bitly leaves. Its pricing comparison has no revenue or payment row on any plan, and the nearest items are Premium's campaign tracking at $199 a month and Enterprise's advanced performance tracking.

A TrackRev link records the click and matches it to the payment that followed, so a report can show what a link earned.

If you only need click counts, Bitly Core at $120 a year or Short.io's free plan costs less than Starter at $351.

Two TrackRev tools replace pieces of Bitly's plans without an account. The UTM builder does what Bitly puts on Core, and the QR code generator makes static codes with no signup, no watermark and no expiry.

Bitly's downgrade article describes a Bitly QR code as a scannable form of a short link, so a downgrade treats it like one, while a static code encodes your URL directly and carries no scan counts.

Dynamic versus static QR codes covers the trade.