about.

site-shortner started, like most small tools, as a fix for a personal annoyance: pasting 120-character staging URLs into chat threads and release notes, then watching half of them die within a quarter when a path changed or a page moved.

The internal version did one thing — mint a short alias, let us repoint it later — and it turned out that "let us repoint it later" was the feature. Links we'd shipped into app release notes, README badges, and email footers months earlier just kept working, because the address was ours and the destination was a setting. Friends asked for keys. Then people we didn't know asked for keys. At some point, writing this page became easier than explaining it one email at a time.

what it is now

A deliberately small service: five API endpoints, a CLI, and a redirect edge that treats answering fast and staying up as the entire job description. There is no roadmap wall of upcoming integrations. There is a changelog, which we think says more.

operating principles

• One job. We redirect requests and count them. Features that aren't that — page builders, pixel managers, retargeting anything — belong to other companies, and they can keep them.
• Count requests, not people. Stats exist so you know a link is working. They are hit counts with coarse context, not surveillance with a dashboard. The privacy page is short on purpose.
• Degrade politely. Deleted links get a 30-day fallback, expired links land where their owner chose, and unknown slugs return an honest 404 instead of an ad farm. The failure modes are designed, not inherited.
• Grow slower than we could. Keys go out in batches because a redirect service you depend on should never be run hotter than its team can operate calmly.

who runs it

A small independent crew of backend people — the kind who get genuinely worked up about cache headers, which, for a redirect service, is exactly the pathology you want. Bootstrapped, no investors, and the bills are paid by the plans, which keeps the incentives where they belong: on keeping your links answering.

Say hi, ask for a key, or tell us what's broken: hey@site-shortner.link. A human reads it.