Free, and this page explains how
A free link locker that does not sell your visitors
Every feature, no advertising, no account, no paid tier holding the basics hostage. The interesting question is not whether it is free — it is what free costs everywhere else.
- No ads on your unlock pages
- No account
- No visitor tracking
What “free” usually costs
Most free link lockers are advertising businesses. That is not an accusation, it is a business model — and it is one worth understanding before you send your own audience to one, because you are the person recommending it.
When advertising pays for the tool, the unlock page stops being a formality and starts being inventory. That is where the interstitial comes from, and the countdown, and the second countdown, and the "your download will begin in 5…" that begins nothing. Each of those is another impression. The friction is not a side effect of the design; it is the design.
The second cost is data. A free tool with an advertising layer has an advertising network embedded in it, and that network sees every visitor who opens one of your links — their IP address, their user agent, and often a cross-site identifier that follows them afterwards. You did not consent to that on their behalf, but from their point of view you sent them there.
The third cost shows up later: a feature you assumed was included turns out to sit behind a plan. Usually it is analytics, or expiry, or the ability to edit a link you already shared.
Included, permanently
- Unlimited links
- Up to 8 steps per link
- Custom link endings
- Expiry dates and unlock caps
- Creator avatar and five themes
- Privacy-first analytics
- English and Vietnamese unlock pages
- Edit, disable and delete any time
Things we do not do
- Advertising on unlock pagesIt is the thing that makes this category feel cheap, and it is your audience seeing it, not ours.
- Selling visitor dataThere is nothing to sell — no IP addresses, no user agents, no cross-day identifiers are collected.
- Interstitials and countdownsA timer before a page you already asked for is a way to serve one more ad impression.
- A paid tier that unlocks the basicsExpiry, analytics and custom slugs are not premium features. They are the product.
Why this one can afford to be free
The architecture, specifically. It is worth being concrete, because "it's cheap to run" is what everyone says.
Every marketing page on this site — including the one you are reading — is static HTML generated at build time and served from Cloudflare's edge network. Opening it does not start a server, run a database query or execute any application code. It is a file.
An unlock page does run code, because it has to check expiry and moderation status on every request. That work is one lookup on a unique index in Cloudflare D1 and one write to Analytics Engine, which is built for append-only event streams and costs a fraction of a database row. There is no view counter being incremented in a relational table, no session row per visitor, and no image pipeline — every graphic on the site is inline SVG or CSS.
The result is that a link with ten thousand views costs roughly ten thousand index lookups. That is a rounding error, and it is why there is no pressure to put an ad in front of it.
There are limits, and they are honest ones: 40 links per day per address, 8 steps per link, 512 KB per avatar. Those exist to stop abuse, not to sell you a plan — a creator will never notice them, and a spam operation hits them in minutes.
If you are comparing free options
Four questions worth asking of anything in this category, ours included:
- Open one of their example links on a phone. How long until you can act? Anything over two seconds is a choice someone made.
- Open devtools and look at the network tab. Count the third-party domains. Each one is a company that now knows your visitor opened your link.
- Read what the steps claim. If any of them says "verified" next to a subscribe, it is not true — no platform API allows it. See the social steps page for the specifics.
- Find out what happens if you lose access. No account means no password reset. Ask what the recovery story is before you need it.
We have written up the comparison in more detail on thealternatives page, including the places where we are explicit that we have not measured something.
Questions about the free plan
What is the catch?
There is not one, but there is a limit: this is free at the scale a creator operates at, and it is rate limited to prevent abuse — 40 links per day per address, 8 steps per link, 512 KB avatars. If you need to create thousands of links programmatically, this is not the tool for you, and no version of it will be.
How can it be free with no ads?
Because of what it runs on. The whole site is static HTML served from Cloudflare's edge, and an unlock page is one indexed database read plus one analytics event — no servers idling, no per-view compute, no bandwidth bill for video ads. A link locker of this shape genuinely costs almost nothing to operate at creator scale. Tools that need advertising usually need it because they are also running the infrastructure to serve the advertising.
Will you start charging later?
Honest answer: we cannot promise the far future, and anyone who does is guessing. What we can say is what would not change — no advertising on unlock pages and no selling of visitor data, because those are the reasons this exists. If a paid tier ever appears it would be for things that genuinely cost money at scale, not for the features listed above.
Is there a limit on how many people can unlock a link?
Only the one you set yourself. By default a link is unlimited; you can cap it if you want to run a limited drop, and the cap is enforced atomically on the server so a cap of 100 means exactly 100 even under simultaneous requests.
Do I need to give an email address?
No. There is no account, no email, no verification step. You get a management key when you create a link, and that key is the only credential. We store a one-way hash of it, so save it — nobody can recover it, including us.
Make a link and check it yourself
Open the result on your phone and time it. That is the only benchmark that matters.