No account · No ads · No tracking
One link. Clear steps. Your content, unlocked.
Keyway is a free link locker for creators. Point a short link at your file, add a few honest steps for visitors to complete, and share it anywhere — no account, no ads, no tracking.
- Free
- No account needed
- No ads, ever
- No visitor tracking
Create your unlock link
Nothing to sign up for. Fill this in, press create, and you have a working link — plus a private key to manage it later.
Your link is ready
Save this now. It is the only way to edit or delete your link, and we cannot recover it — we store a one-way hash of it, never the key itself.
Use this to invite — not require — a subscribe or follow.
Share this somewhere only your real audience will see it — in a video, a pinned comment, a community post.
How a Keyway link works
Three steps for you. One clear page for the people you share it with.
Point a link at your file
Paste the URL you want to protect — a Drive folder, a Notion page, a release on your own site. It stays private until a visitor finishes your steps.
Add the steps you want
Send people to your channel, your community, your site. Or ask for a code you shared in a video. You choose the order; visitors work top to bottom.
Share one short link
You get a clean URL and a private management key. Edit, disable or delete the link any time — no account to lose access to.
What we check, and what we don’t
Most tools in this category imply they can confirm a subscription or a follow. None of them can. YouTube removed the API scope years ago; Instagram, TikTok and X never had one; and every platform named here prohibits gating content on incentivised engagement. So Keyway does not pretend.
Genuinely verified
- A code you shared, checked against a salted hash on our server
- An explicit confirmation, recorded with a timestamp
- That a link was opened, and how long before it was confirmed
Never claimed
- That someone subscribed to a channel
- That someone followed or liked an account
- That someone joined a server and stayed
Social steps in Keyway are visit steps, labelled as such on the page the visitor sees. You can invite a subscribe underneath the button — you cannot require one, and we will never tell a visitor we confirmed something we did not.
Why creators pick Keyway
The things that matter after the first link: speed, trust, and being able to tell whether it worked.
Fast everywhere
Rendered as static HTML at Cloudflare’s edge, with almost no JavaScript. Unlock pages open quickly on a 3G phone in Hanoi, not just on fibre in California.
No visitor tracking
No third-party scripts, no advertising pixels, no fingerprinting. We record a country, a device category and a referrer bucket — never an IP address, never anything that survives midnight.
Built to resist abuse
Every destination is validated against private ranges, IDN spoofing and a domain denylist. Every unlock page carries a report button that a person reads.
Analytics that answer questions
Views, approximate unique visitors, unlock rate, where people drop off, and which countries they came from. Enough to improve your link; not enough to identify anyone.
English and Vietnamese
Not a machine translation. The interface, the errors and the help text were written in both languages, and your unlock page can be in either.
Expiry and limits
Set a link to expire in 24 hours or 30 days, or cap it at a number of unlocks. Both are enforced server-side, atomically — a limit of 100 means 100.
Common questions
What is a link locker?
A link locker is a page that sits in front of a URL. Visitors complete one or more steps you define — visiting your channel, reading a note, entering a code — and then get access to the link you protected. It is how creators share a free download without publishing the raw URL where it can be copied, re-hosted and stripped of any credit.
Do I need an account?
No. You create a link and receive two URLs: a public one to share, and a private management key that lets you edit, disable or delete it later. We store only a one-way hash of that key, so save it somewhere — if you lose it, nobody can recover it, including us.
Can Keyway verify that someone subscribed to my channel?
No, and neither can anything else that claims to. YouTube removed the API scope that would allow it, and Instagram, TikTok, X and Discord have never offered one — incentivising follows also breaks every one of their platform policies. Keyway confirms a visitor opened your link and that any code they entered was correct, and it says exactly that on the page. A subscribe or follow can be invited, never required.
Is it really free?
Yes, with no ads and no upsell in the unlock flow. It runs on Cloudflare Workers, where a link locker of this shape costs almost nothing to operate — a page view is one database read and one analytics event. There is no plan where your visitors see advertising, because that is the thing we are trying not to be.
What happens to my visitors’ data?
Almost nothing is collected. We never store IP addresses or user agents. Unique-visitor counts come from a salted hash that includes the date, so the same person is a different value tomorrow and cross-day tracking is impossible even for us. Referrers are bucketed into categories, so we know traffic came from a chat app without knowing which private server.
Can I use my own link ending?
Yes — pick anything from 3 to 32 characters using lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, as long as it is not already taken. Endings that imitate login or payment pages are refused, because a convincing short URL is the most valuable part of a phishing attempt.
Looking for a Sub2Unlock alternative?
If you arrived here comparing tools, the comparison page lays out what is genuinely different — and is explicit about what we have not measured.