If you are comparing link shorteners, you have probably lined them up by price per month and by how many links each tier allows. That is the comparison every pricing page invites you to make, and it hides the limit that actually bites.
For click analytics, the limit that matters is how long your data survives.
What Bitly actually meters
Bitly's published pricing, as of July 2026:
| Plan | Price | Links/month | Click data history |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5 | (not offered) |
| Core | $10/mo, annual only ($120/yr) | 100 | 30 days |
| Growth | $29/mo annual, or $35/mo | 500 | 4 months |
| Premium | $199/mo annual, or $300/mo | 3,000 | 1 year |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | 2 years |
Clicks themselves are unlimited on every tier. That sounds generous, and it is the number everyone quotes. But look at the right-hand column.
On Core, your click history is 30 days. Run a campaign in March, come back in May to see how it did, and there is nothing to see. The clicks happened. The record of them expired.
The second thing worth noticing: city-level and device tracking sit on Premium. That is $199/month billed annually, or $300 month to month. If "I just want to know where my clicks come from and what they are opening it on" is your entire requirement, Bitly's answer is its top self-serve tier.
None of this makes Bitly a bad product. It is a mature platform with a real enterprise business, and the pricing is shaped for that buyer. But if you are one person with some links and a question about them, you are shopping in the wrong aisle.
The question to ask every shortener
Before you compare prices, ask this:
"In six months, can I still see what happened to a link I made today?"
It reframes the whole evaluation. A $10/month plan that forgets everything after 30 days is not cheaper than a $7/month plan that does not. It is a different product that happens to have a similar-looking price.
Then two follow-ups:
"Is the granularity I need on the tier I can afford?" Country-level is common on cheap plans. City and device often are not. Decide which you actually need before you pay for a tier that gives you neither.
"What happens to my links if I stop paying?" This is the one people find out about late. A short link is a promise printed on things you no longer control: business cards, packaging, an old tweet, someone else's blog post. If those links go dead or start showing a parked page when you downgrade, you have handed your reputation to a billing relationship. Ask before you print.
A checklist for comparing link tools
- Data retention window. The single most under-compared spec. Get the number in months.
- Granularity per tier. Country, city, device, browser, referrer, unique versus repeat. Which of those are on the plan you would actually buy?
- Unique versus total clicks. If a tool only reports total clicks, one enthusiastic person and a preview bot can look like a successful campaign. You want both numbers.
- What happens on downgrade or cancellation. Do existing links keep resolving?
- Link creation limits. Monthly caps are common. If you generate links programmatically, a 100/month cap disappears fast.
- Custom domain cost. Often the real jump between tiers.
- Is there an API on the plan you can afford? If links need to come out of your own tooling rather than a dashboard, check this early. It is frequently gated.
- Export. Can you get a CSV out? If the answer is no, the data was never really yours.
That list is the useful part of this post. Run it against any tool, including mine.
Where Swyfty fits, and where it does not
Full disclosure: I build Swyfty, so treat this section as the biased part and check it yourself.
It exists because of the gap above. Short links, click analytics, QR codes and a link-in-bio page behind one login, with a REST API. Analytics include country and city, device, browser, referrer, and unique versus repeat visitors, and they are on the $7/month plan rather than a $199 one. There is CSV export, so the data leaves with you. Free covers 3 links, 500 visits each, and one bio page, with a short interstitial before each redirect; Pro is $7/month or $60/year and removes the interstitial, adds custom slugs, QR codes and hourly checks that your destination URLs are still alive.
Now the honest part, because a comparison post that only lists strengths is an ad. Swyfty does not have:
- Team accounts or multiple seats
- White-label custom domains
- Retargeting pixels
- A/B testing of links
- Scheduled link expiry
If you need branded custom domains at scale, or several people working in the same account with permissions, Bitly or Rebrandly is genuinely the better buy and I would rather you went there than churned out of mine in a month. If all you want is a bio page and nothing else, Linktree has a much larger template ecosystem.
It is also early. There is no traction to point at, no testimonials, and I am not going to invent any. What I can tell you is what the product does and what it costs.
The decision rule
Are you buying link infrastructure for a team, or answers about your own links?
If it is a team, buy the platform. Seats, permissions, branded domains and long retention are what those prices are for, and they are worth it at that size.
If it is answers, then retention and granularity are the only specs that matter, and you should not have to reach an enterprise tier to keep six months of your own click history.
Either way: compare the retention column first. It is the one nobody puts in the comparison table, and it is the one you notice in six months when you go looking for a number that is no longer there.
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