Gozi.to vs the competition: an honest comparison

I run Gozi.to. I built it on Cloudflare's free plan, and the design goal was never “beat Bitly” — it was “never pay for hosting, and never break a link that already exists.” That one constraint decides almost everything about the product, good and bad.

If you are choosing a shortener, you are really choosing which trade-off you can live with. So here is the trade-off Gozi.to made, an honest comparison with the services people actually use, and a straight answer about when you should pick one of them instead.

The one-paragraph version

Gozi.to is the right choice if you want free click analytics with no account, no cookies on your visitors, and an API you do not have to pay for — and you can accept that anonymous links expire after 90 days, that there are no custom domains, and that one person maintains it with no SLA. If you need a branded domain, a team, or an uptime guarantee with a contract behind it, stop reading and use Short.io or Dub.co.

What Gozi.to actually does

Paste a URL, get gozi.to/aB3dK9x and a QR code. The specifics, because the rest of this post depends on them:

• Without an account: 25 links per IP per day, 5 per minute, a Cloudflare Turnstile human check, and the link expires after 90 days. You get a one-time private stats URL of the form gozi.to/m#m_<secret>. The secret lives in the URL fragment, so it never reaches the server and never appears in a log.
• With a free account (GitHub or Google): 500 links a day, links that never expire, custom codes like gozi.to/launch, editable destinations, CSV export, and an API with bearer keys at 60 requests a minute.
• Stats: clicks per day, country, device, browser, OS, referring domain. Bots and link-preview fetchers are counted separately. Ninety days in detail, then daily totals for 400 days, then a lifetime counter.
• Safety: every destination goes through Google Safe Browsing at creation. Links made in the last 72 hours are rescanned every 15 minutes; older ones on a rolling basis, up to 2,000 a night, once their last scan is over a week old. Three reports put a link behind a warning page immediately.
• Redirects are always 302 and set no cookies.

How it compares

Competitor columns describe each service's free tier as advertised on 22 September 2026. Free tiers change constantly — check before you commit to one.

Where Gozi.to genuinely wins

The free tier is the whole product, not a trial

There is no paid plan to graduate to, so there is no feature being held back to create one. The API, custom codes, QR codes and analytics are all free. Most competitors' free tiers exist to generate the friction that sells the paid tier; Gozi.to's exists because the running cost is genuinely close to zero.

It is the most private mainstream option

No visitor IP address is stored on a click — not hashed, not truncated, simply not recorded. No cookie is set on a redirect. The referrer is reduced to a domain before it is written down. The creator's IP is kept only as a keyed hash for rate limiting, and deleted after 30 days. If you are sharing links with people who would rather not be profiled, that is a real difference and not a privacy-policy flourish.

Anonymous links are genuinely anonymous, and still have stats

The management secret lives in the URL fragment, so it never travels to the server. Nobody at Gozi.to can look up who owns an anonymous link, because nobody stored it. is.gd and TinyURL give you anonymity without statistics; Bitly gives you statistics in exchange for an account. Gozi.to is the combination.

Moderation is aggressive, which protects you

Rescanning every 15 minutes for the first three days catches the classic trick of shortening a clean URL and swapping the destination once it has been shared. A shortener domain that gets blacklisted by mail filters is worthless to everyone using it, so strictness here is a feature for legitimate users, not a tax on them.

Where Gozi.to loses

No custom domains

Every link is gozi.to/…. For a brand, go.yourcompany.com measurably improves click-through, and — more importantly — you own it, so your links survive the shortener disappearing. Gozi.to cannot do this, and because the domain is a single configuration value baked through the service, it is not a small change. This alone disqualifies it for most marketing teams.

No teams

There are exactly two roles: user and admin. No shared workspaces, no per-seat access, no audit log of who changed what. Two people managing the same links means sharing one login.

One maintainer, no SLA, no support contract

The only support channel is an email address. If I am on a plane, nothing happens until I land. There is no status page, no on-call rotation, and no contractual remedy if your campaign link breaks. Competitors charge money partly because money buys somebody being awake.

The free plan has a hard ceiling, and it is shared

Cloudflare's free plan allows 100,000 Worker requests a day across my entire Cloudflare account, not just this project. Gozi.to degrades gracefully up to a point: at 90% it pauses anonymous link creation until midnight UTC while signed-in users carry on. But at 100% the Worker stops and every gozi.to link fails until 00:00 UTC. That has not happened, and the fix is a few dollars a month, but I am not going to pretend the ceiling is not there. Storage behaves the same way: under pressure, anonymous links start expiring after 30 days instead of 90.

Anonymous links expire, cannot be edited, and cannot be recovered

Ninety days, then gone. You cannot change an anonymous link's destination — the management token only lets you read statistics or delete it. And if you lose the gozi.to/m#m_… URL it is gone permanently, because only a hash of it is stored and there is no email on file to send a reset to. Signing in fixes all three, which is exactly the trade I designed, but it is still a limitation.

Always 302, never 301

Browsers cache permanent redirects, which means repeat clicks would never reach the service and would never be counted. Gozi.to chose analytics over cacheability. If you are consolidating link equity for SEO and want a genuinely permanent redirect, use something configurable.

The analytics are estimates

They come from Cloudflare Workers Analytics Engine, which samples under load and scales the result back up. At volume that is close; at low volume it is rough. There is no per-click event log, no unique-visitor count, no UTM builder and no QR-scan attribution. Also missing: bulk create, password-protected links, link-in-bio pages, and CSV export stops at 10,000 rows.

Some legitimate slugs get refused

Reserved words, and anything containing strings like login, verify, wallet or paypal, are rejected, because that is what phishing links look like. Occasionally that blocks something innocent. Other shorteners are also blocked as destinations, so you cannot chain one into another.

So which should you use?

• Bitly — the one everyone recognises, and recognition matters: some corporate filters treat a bit.ly link as familiar where they would question an unknown domain. But the free tier has become a funnel, and custom back-halves and meaningful analytics sit behind a subscription. Use Bitly if recognition of the link itself is the point, and you will pay for it.
• TinyURL — genuinely no-account, genuinely free custom aliases, and it has been alive for two decades, which is the most underrated feature a shortener can have. Analytics are thin. Use TinyURL if you want a permanent link and do not care who clicked.
• Short.io — the best-built of the commercial options for the custom-domain case, with a real free tier to start on. Use Short.io if you need go.yourbrand.com and a dashboard your colleagues can log into.
• Dub.co — open source, modern, excellent API and developer experience, self-hostable if you outgrow the hosted plan. This is the competitor I would point a developer at. Use Dub if you want Gozi.to's philosophy with a company and a roadmap behind it.
• Rebrandly — the enterprise-shaped one: many domains, workspaces, integrations, sales-led. Use Rebrandly if a marketing department is making the decision.
• is.gd / v.gd — the purest tool on the list. No account, no tracking, no bloat, and it has quietly worked forever. v.gd previews the destination, which Gozi.to only does for links it finds suspicious. Use is.gd when you want a short link and nothing else whatsoever.
• YOURLS / Shlink — self-hosting. You own the domain, the database and the redirect. Shlink in particular has a proper API, QR codes and real analytics. The cost is not money: it is that you are now the one who gets paged when the redirect breaks at 2 a.m., and you own the abuse problem the first time someone pushes a phishing URL through your open installation. Self-host if the links must outlive any third party and you genuinely want that responsibility.
• Gozi.to — free click analytics, no account needed, no cookies on your visitors, a free API, and a maintainer who will list its flaws in public. Use it for personal links, side projects, documentation, QR codes on printed material, and anywhere you would rather not hand a visitor's behaviour to an ad-tech company.

What I did not measure

Saying this plainly is what makes the rest of the post worth anything. I have not benchmarked redirect latency across providers. I have no uptime figures for anyone, including Gozi.to — there is no monitoring behind that claim because there is no monitoring. And I have not audited what any competitor does with click data beyond what their own privacy policies say. The table reflects what the published pricing pages said on 22 September 2026, and free tiers move constantly. If something here is wrong or out of date, email hello@gozi.to and I will correct the post and say that I did.