Bit.ly's shady business model

If you click on "pricing" you will see this: "STARTING AT $995/month". I think that's pretty clear. Maybe the service changed and they started to charge and they didn't notify you.

Link: https://bitly.com/a/pricing

And a quote:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Robert J. Hanlon.

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Edit (please read this)

Oz Kats said: "as of april last year when we signed up for bit.ly that page was nowhere to be found"

My reply:

That actually changes everything.

As I understand, they are not retaining your data, but will pull the plug on a service you now depend and are not offering migration options, am I correct? This is certainly an awful business practice it could be illegal, but there is a problem.

At the time they failed to communicate the pricing so you started using their service, judging it would be free. If they started to charge, you could just pay or move to another provider, but the very model of their tool makes it impossible for you to truly "migrate" to another provider since the links are widespread, this isn't exactly their fault (nor yours).

If they are charging you 995$ just because they know you are out of options you might have a case, but that's so time/money consuming I would advise you to just do your best to migrate the widespread links.

Best of luck

If you keep track of either the short URL or the long URL somewhere on your end, you can get the other part using bitly's link API: http://dev.bitly.com/links.html and the associated metrics with the link metrics API: http://dev.bitly.com/link_metrics.html -- Once you have that, you can write a simple app (or use any of the free ones out there) to provide the same service.

Or honestly, just pay the $700 if it's not worth the dev investment and provides a significant value to your service.

It seems the article writer not only did not read the TOS before signing up, but also make a critical error of thinking they could use the service for free at the tune of 50,000 links per month!

They built their company around another company's free service, ignored the fact that Bitly has to make money off their service somehow (guess what, they charge for high volume customers), and then became outraged when bitly told them they needed to pay up.

If link shortening is so integral to the business, why have they not implemented their own link shortener?

Quit complaining you got something for free and abused it, and now they want you to pay them for the apparently critical service they provide you with.

You could write your own exporter pretty trivially, using their API or resolving the URLs.

I'm amazed that they thought it was a smart business decision to rely on a free bit.ly account (with their own domain!) instead of running their own URL shortener. Yourls (https://yourls.org/) is free and open source, and has been around for years. There's an excellent reason why every major publisher operates their own URL shortening service, and this article demonstrates it perfectly.