about
A shortener with
nothing hidden.
shortn is a link shortener that tells you what it does with your data, publishes every change it makes, and does not pretend to be something it is not.
Why it exists
Most shorteners are free because you are the product. They want your traffic profile, your click history and your patience while they show you an advert. shortn takes a different trade: it is small, it is honest, and it asks almost nothing of you.
There is no account to create, no email to hand over, no cookie banner to dismiss and no third-party script watching what you paste. The whole interface is a few static files and a handful of edge functions.
How it is built
| Piece | What it does |
|---|---|
| Static site | Plain HTML, one shared stylesheet and one small script. No framework, no build step required to read it. |
| Edge functions | Serverless handlers on Cloudflare's network for the API and for redirects. |
| KV store | One namespace. Slug to destination, a click counter per slug, rate-limit buckets and a short stats cache. |
| Rate limiting | Sliding one-minute windows in KV with a short expiry, so the counters clean themselves up. |
| Link lifetime | Seven days. Each link is written with a matching KV expiry and every read re-checks the deadline, so a link past seven days is treated as missing and deleted on the spot. |
| QR codes | Rendered by a single browser library. The content never reaches a server. |
| Themes | Three of them — dark, light and Halloween — as CSS variables on one root element. |
What it deliberately does not do
- No user accounts. Nobody's identity is attached to a link, so nobody can be banned by accident.
- No link analytics dashboard. Counts exist and are public, but there is no per-referrer or per-country reporting. That data is never collected.
- No third-party ad network. Rotating banners on the site are hosted by us. No keys, no trackers, no revenue-sharing scripts reading the page.
- No permanent links. Every link lives exactly seven days, then the record and its click count are deleted and the slug becomes available to anyone. That is the trade for running on free-tier storage.
- No private links. There is no login and no ownership, so any destination and click count is readable by anyone who knows the slug.
- No uptime guarantees. It runs on free-tier infrastructure. See the changelog for what is fixed and what is not.
Where the money goes
There is no charge for anything, so there is no billing page either. The rotating banners on the site exist to cover the hosting bill, which is the only cost involved. If they ever go away, the service keeps working.
What data exists
For each link: the destination, the slug, a creation timestamp and an integer click count, kept for seven days and then deleted. For each visitor: a rate-limit key built from their IP, which expires within two minutes and is never attached to a link. That is the whole list.
The details, including what Cloudflare sees in the process of serving a request, are in the privacy page.
Getting in touch
Reports of abuse, broken redirects or anything that needs correcting go to abuse@shortn.pages.dev. A link that needs to disappear before its seven days are up should include the slug so it can be found quickly — after that it deletes itself. For anything about how the service behaves, the documentation and API reference cover it in more detail than an email would.
Related
There is a second site, oursites-lol, which lists projects and tracks their live status. It shares this design system and nothing else.