Free today.

Tryst Link is free to use today. There is no paid tier, no premium unlock, and no credit card to add. This page exists to tell you what you get, what we are paying to provide it, and what we will do if costs grow beyond what we can absorb.

What's included today

• Unlimited short links per account.
• Unlimited clicks on those links — no rate limits, no quotas.
• Custom slugs (the bit after the slash).
• Aggregate click counts, country breakdown, device class.
• Link expiry dates.
• The QR code generator, which is fully client-side and costs us nothing per use.
• The blog and all reading material.

Why it can be free

The marketing site, the blog, and the QR generator are static and CDN-served — they cost roughly the same to host whether one person visits or one million do. The shortener uses Supabase's free tier, which covers ~50,000 monthly active users and 500MB of database storage. For a small service that is plenty.

We have no salaries to pay, no investors to repay, and no advertising budget to recoup. The marginal cost of one more person using the service is, accounting for current infrastructure, very low.

What we don't do

• We do not sell your data, because the data we collect (link records, aggregate clicks) is not the kind of data anyone buys.
• We do not run ads.
• We do not have an enterprise sales team to fund.
• We do not have a freemium funnel that throttles you into a paid tier.

What happens when costs grow

If the service grows past the free tiers of our infrastructure, we will need a way to fund it. The options on the table, in order of preference:

1. A "buy us a coffee" tip jar — voluntary, no features locked.
2. A paid tier for features that are genuinely expensive to provide (very high traffic, long retention of click data, custom domains, team features). Today's free features stay free.
3. Sponsorship or a benefactor — disclosed openly on this page, no influence on product decisions.

Whatever we do, we will give existing users at least 30 days' notice before any change. Today's free tier — unlimited links, unlimited clicks, the dashboard, the analytics — will remain available to everyone who signed up before the change.

Abuse considerations

We may rate-limit or restrict accounts that create unusual volumes of links or send unusual click traffic, because abuse is the most likely way a free service like this gets shut down. Normal use will never trigger these limits.