💰 Why Y.GY Costs Money

Why does Y.GY cost money? Why isn't it free? Some other link shorteners and QR code creators let you get started for free. (There are lots of them!) So why not Y.GY? Well, we started as a totally free service. But we're now always gated behind payment starting as low as $4 a month. How come? This blog post goes over our decision making, and we hope that you'll understand why it's the right call.

The big issue for any online link shortener is dealing with abuse. Cybercriminals are constantly using link shorteners to disguise their malicious links. In turn, anti-virus software will recognize that a shortened link is pointing somewhere malicious, and such anti-virus software is then going to prevent its users from using that link shortener. This means that abuse of our service actually harms all our users, especially the legitimate ones: people might not be able to access your links if other people have been abusing that same link shortener!

This is a problem that many link shorteners have: they get blacklisted by certain anti-virus software, which makes them less reliable or useful. Here at Y.GY, we're endeavoring to be the best link shortener, which means that your links should never fail or be subject to any kind of malware alert, which would hurt user trust. This means that we have to paywall the service, to cut down on abuse as much as possible.

On the flip-side, we also believe that we've built an amazing link shortener with some of the very best features available. We want our users to really get a lot of value out of our service, and for that, prices starting at $4/month are more than affordable. It's very reasonably priced. As many great indie saas builders have said -- putting up a paywall gets you better customers. We want our product to be truly helpful to our customers, such that our customers will be our partners for the long term.

We do still offer, entirely for free, our QR code maker. It works really nicely — it just redirects directly to the URL that you input rather than going through Y.GY. So the users who were using us for QR codes are still benefiting plenty, we just no longer suffer the burden of redirecting to that content. It's only that if you need custom analytics or some of our security features that you'd need to make an account with us and start paying.