Whenever I see mentions of go links, I think "How are you handling TLS?" which there's not a great answer for* so I think it's neat that the extension model solves this problem. * I don't trust most enterprise IT teams to be able to set-up and administer a secure CA with the appropriate critical nameConstraint that limits the CA to signing certificates for `go`. -------- OP: You should probably mention the TLS proble…
That's a great suggestion, our support page could include more technical details. It's long over due for some updates.
Curious about the pricing. It says $2.75 / month / user but it also says unlimited users. Does that mean you can pay $2.75 / month / user for as many users as you want? Seems confusing and I'd assume it's unlimited users if I'm paying per seat. Can everyone in the company use the go links but only paid users can create them?
Good catch, we've been doing some price experimentation with user count and price, and I think that line needs to be updated.
We've been using golinks.io for a few months now at my current employer, and it's been very well received by folks, with both technical and non-technical users adopting it quickly.
Variable links are very useful - links like "go/monitoring/alpha", "go/monitoring/beta" (with a template "go/monitoring/$1 -> $1.example.com"), make it super easy to keep things up to date.
Congrats. I used this funtionality in a couple of companies I worked and its neat. Never thought someone could make a business out of it. Especially, since ever tech company's favourite question is "Design a URL shortener"!!
My understanding of the first concern was that users are in trouble if GoLinks shuts down or has an outage. Do you have any mitigation plan for such cases?
Yep, It’s in our terms of service, in the unlikely case something happens to GoLinks, we will provide you with all your links. But we plan on being around for a long time.
Grandparent asked about outage. Not about going out of business.
It's not normal and shouldn't be allowed to become some dystopian new normal.
This is definitely a real concern, and we're actually exploring the Chrome permissions to see if it's possible to redirect your traffic, without requiring the "Read all data" permission, because you're right, that shouldn't be the norm.
You can also do this in a Chrome extension by overriding the user's proxy settings, which is worse.
It's less of a link shortener and more of a link manager for companies. The concern that companies have with URL shorteners is they can't manage who is creating these links, and who owns these links. With GoLinks, the company will own the links, they can manage, edit, update, delete any links within the organization, so they will be centralized. The added benefit is that with a memorable link, you can access go/benef…
The issue is that you obfuscate the destination of the link. This is a big no-no in enterprise fraud prevention. We train people to only click trusted links. How do I know whether a golink is trusted or not? And what if my golinks account is compromised and all my links get redirected to phising sites? All of this huge risk so... people can remember the link?
These are all great questions. Security is definitely our number one priority, especially since most of our customers are large enterprises. In order to create a link, you must first authenticate with your company's Single Sign-on solution to access the dashboard. If a user cannot properly be authenticated through Okta, GSuite, or another SSO, then that user cannot use the shortened link and cannot access the knowledge base of links. Second, all of the destinations can be audited in the dashboard, and we're currently testing solutions for checking the safety of a link that users can redirect to. This is unique to a golink system since the company can set these policies up for its users. For example, as an admin, you can disallow "http" links and force all links to use "https" to increase the security of the links. Now the company has control over which links are allowed to be used. The memorable link portion is also an added benefit of implementing a golink system.
We've been using golinks.io for a few months now at my current employer, and it's been very well received by folks, with both technical and non-technical users adopting it quickly. Variable links are very useful - links like "go/monitoring/alpha", "go/monitoring/beta" (with a template "go/monitoring/$1 -> $1.example.com"), make it super easy to keep things up to date.
Glad to hear that it's been a hit within your organization! We love to hear about happy customers. :)
I'd probably use it or give it a try. The pricing jump from the free to paid tier after you hit 11 users is a bit steep. Like from free to 363 USD at once. Also, I'd'offer a feature to opt-out of your analytics collection as I don't see a reason why your company should know on how exactly our team members work all day long.
Pricing is always a tough thing to get right. If you look at Shopify's pricing page on the internet archive, you can see it changes almost every week since 2012, so it's something that all companies struggle with getting right. We're always open to feedback from customers.
For the analytics, this is a trend I've personally seen in SaaS products lately, where companies can get in-depth analytics on how their team members are working. If you look at Github, Jira, or Google Docs, you can see personal stats for user events. Even Slack is starting to send out the number of private vs public messages sent throughout the week. It's something that definitely needs to be discussed because I can see it being used for good or being used for bad (as in micromanagement). Google Docs is the only one I know of that gives the option to opt out of usage analytics, so that's a great suggestion for a feature.
It's not normal and shouldn't be allowed to become some dystopian new normal.
If it's found to be grabbing more data than it should, people can report them and the extension can be banned from the Chrome Web Store. It's not ideal but in order to make utilities that work on every page, these permissions are needed. The code inside the extension bundle (.crx) would need to contain the potential for abuse, and if it gets popular enough, security researchers will look at it. Even if it's not popul…
It's all about building trust with the company. We don't store or read any information on the sites you visit, we just redirect URLs that contain "go" as the domain, and provide a link for any "go/" links in your browser. We would never risk compromising that trust.
If you take a look at a company like Grammarly, they've built trust with their users, which is why they can have the "Read and modify all data on all sites" and still have 10 million customers. We plan to build the same trust with our customers.