Published September 2, 2026
What a free plan does to a short link
Free shortener plans cost something later in one of three places. An ad on the redirect, a monthly cap on new links, or links that stop resolving when the plan does. What to check, and what the free plan here does.
Free plans in this category are not all the same shape, and the differences do not show up on the day of signing up. They show up months later, in one of three places.
Three free plans, three questions
| Question | Replug | Cutt.ly | uhm.co |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ads on the redirect | Yes | Not verified | None |
| New links per month | Unlimited | 30 | 10 |
| Existing links after a downgrade | Not verified | Not verified | Keep redirecting |
An ad on the redirect
The first thing worth checking is whether the redirect itself is monetised. A shortener that shows an interstitial page before the destination is charging the visitor's attention instead of the sender's card.
This is a real practice rather than a hypothetical one. Replug's free tier, as documented in a published comparison, allows unlimited links and serves ads on redirects.
The cost of that is not the ad. It is that the sender's own audience meets an intermediary page carrying somebody else's message, on a link the sender put in their own email, poster or message. That is worth knowing before the link is printed rather than after.
There is no ad on any redirect here, on any plan. A redirect answers with a 302 and nothing else.
A cap on new links
The second thing is the cap, and specifically what the cap counts.
A cap on new links per month is ordinary and reasonable: a free plan has to have an edge somewhere. Cutt.ly's free tier allows 30 new links a month, and the same source is where that figure comes from.
The question worth asking is whether the number counts links created or links that exist. A cap on links created is a limit on new work. A cap on links that exist eventually forces a choice about which older links to delete, and deleting a short link breaks it for everyone still holding it.
The free plan here allows 10 new links a month, and the count is of links created in the month. Nothing is deleted and nothing is deactivated when the month's allowance is spent. Creation is refused until the next period, which is a refusal delivered to a person at a keyboard rather than to a visitor following a link.
What happens when the plan ends
The third place is the one that actually costs money, and it is the least advertised.
A link is a promise made to everyone who received it, and a plan change is a conversation between a customer and a provider that those people are not part of. A shortener that stops resolving links when a subscription lapses has turned an internal billing event into a public failure.
On this service, no billing state stops an existing link. Running out of the monthly allowance, moving to a smaller plan, cancelling, and letting a subscription lapse all block the creation of new links and leave the existing ones redirecting exactly as before. A cancelled subscription rests on the free plan rather than at zero, because someone who paid and then stopped should not end up worse off than someone who never paid at all.
That guarantee is scoped to billing. It does not cover abuse: a reported and reviewed destination can be taken down, and a suspended account stops resolving. Those are enforcement decisions, and the ability to make them is what keeps the shared domain usable.
The rest of the free plan here
It is permanent rather than a trial, and it is where every approved account starts. It carries 10 new links a month, 30 days of click detail, and QR codes, which are on every plan including this one. It does not require a card.
One thing it does require: access is by request and review rather than instant signup. A person reads the request before an account exists. That is how the shared domain is kept clean, which is the same reason the SMS and mail filters described elsewhere on this blog treat shared shortener domains the way they do.
Custom short names, passwords, expiry dates, custom domains and raw click export are on the paid plans. The full split is on the pricing page.
What the table does not say
Three cells in the figure are marked not verified, and they stay that way on purpose.
Every competitor claim in this post traces to a published source, and no published source was found for what those plans do to existing links after a downgrade. That is exactly the sort of cell a comparison table normally fills with something plausible. A product that argues its own analytics should show what it filtered and why does not get to guess in its own favour on a marketing page.