About luud.link

luud.link turns a long URL into a short one you can put in a message, a bio, or on a printed card. Alongside that it generates QR codes, counts the clicks each link receives, and breaks those clicks down by country, device, and referrer.

There is no account step and no trial. Paste a URL, press the button, and the short link exists — the whole flow takes about five seconds. Signing in with Google is optional and does exactly one thing: it lets your links follow you between devices instead of living in one browser.

Every feature on the site is free, and there is no paid tier waiting behind any of them. Custom aliases, expiry dates, click limits, password-protected links, bulk shortening, QR logos and the statistics are all part of the free service.

luud.link is built and maintained by an independent software developer based in Thailand. It is a one-person project, not a company — which is worth knowing, because it sets your expectations correctly about how fast a reply arrives and who is on the other end of it.

That reply does arrive, though. Email luud.link@gmail.com and a real person reads it, usually within a few days. Abuse reports are handled ahead of everything else.

The service is paid for by advertising. Ads sit in fixed places on the page — beside the tools and beneath the content — and they are the entire business model. There is no premium plan, no credit-card wall on a feature you were halfway through using, and no per-link fee.

What advertising does not mean here is selling anything about you. Your links are not a product, the destinations you shorten are not shared with advertisers, and no profile of your browsing gets built or sold. The ads pay for the servers; that is the whole of the arrangement.

It also means we do not put an interstitial in front of your visitors. Some free shorteners route clicks through a countdown page carrying ads before releasing the visitor to the destination. A luud.link short link redirects straight through — the ads are on our pages, not in your traffic.

Short links resolve on Cloudflare's edge network, so a redirect is answered from a machine near whoever clicked rather than from a single origin server. This is why a link shared in Bangkok and opened in Berlin still turns around in milliseconds.

The pages you are reading are static files, generated at build time and served from the same network. The interactive parts — the shorten form, the statistics, the link list — load on top of that as small scripts rather than the page waiting on a server to render.

QR codes are generated entirely in your browser using your device's own processor. This is a deliberate design choice with a privacy consequence worth stating plainly: a logo you drop into a QR code is composited locally and never uploaded, so there is no copy of your artwork on our side to leak, sell, or be asked to hand over.

A short link is a piece of infrastructure that sits between you and everyone you share it with, which makes restraint a feature. The list below is not a description of features we have not got around to — each one is something the service could technically do and chooses not to.

• No IP addresses. A click records a country, a device type, a referrer host, and a date. Nothing that identifies the person who clicked is stored, which is also why the stats can never tell you about unique visitors.
• No tracking cookies of our own. Signing in sets a session cookie so the login works, and nothing else follows you around.
• No selling or sharing of link data. Destinations, aliases and click counts stay on our side.
• No redirect interstitials. Your visitors go where you sent them, immediately.
• No dark patterns on deletion. Delete a link and it stops resolving right away, taking its statistics with it.

Anyone can create a link without an account, which is the feature people come for and also the obvious way a shortener gets abused. We take that seriously rather than treating it as somebody else's problem.

Every visitor can flag a destination through the report page, and reports are reviewed by hand. Links pointing at malware, phishing, or content that breaks the terms are removed, and a removed link stops resolving everywhere it was ever shared. A short list of paths is also reserved so that site routes like /blog and /faq can never be claimed as an alias — the site's own page would win that collision, leaving you with a link that looked created and silently never worked.

The project is actively developed, and most of what has shipped since launch started as somebody's suggestion. The bulk tools, the UTM builder, the browser extension and the QR logo support all arrived that way.

If something is missing or awkward, the suggestion form goes straight to the person who writes the code. It takes no name and no email — which is why we cannot reply to it, and why anything needing an answer is better sent by email.