Free Link Shortener — No Signup, No Ads, No Limits

A Link Shortener Built Around Privacy

Most popular link shorteners are built around tracking. They log every click, record the visitor's location and device, and use that data to build advertising profiles. KWY takes the opposite approach: no user accounts, no click analytics dashboard, no data monetisation. When you shorten a URL, the only data stored is what is strictly necessary to operate the redirect — the destination URL, your IP address for rate limiting, and a timestamp.

How KWY Compares to Other Link Shorteners

Services like Bitly, TinyURL, and Rebrandly offer useful features, but most require you to create an account before you can manage or delete your links. KWY requires nothing. Paste your URL, get a short link, and optionally use the delete link to remove it later — all without signing up.

KWY is also fully open about what it collects (see our Privacy Policy) and who operates it (see About KWY). There are no dark patterns, no bait-and-switch free tiers, and no advertising injected into the redirect path.

Security Features Built In

Every URL submitted to KWY goes through a multi-step validation pipeline before a short link is created:

• Scheme must be http:// or https:// — no javascript:, data:, or ftp: links
• Maximum URL length of 2,048 characters
• DNS resolution check — unresolvable hostnames are rejected
• Private IP range blocking — 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, 127.0.0.1, link-local, and CGNAT ranges are blocked
• Self-referential links to kwy.uk are rejected

This validation protects visitors from being redirected to phishing pages, internal network resources, or malicious script URLs.

Technical Details

KWY runs on PHP 8 with a local SQLite database. There are no external API calls, no CDN dependencies, and no JavaScript frameworks. The entire application — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — is served from a single origin and weighs under 30 KB. This means fast load times on any connection, which is a direct ranking factor in Google's Core Web Vitals assessment.

Short codes are 6 characters drawn from a 62-character alphabet, giving 56 billion possible combinations. Delete tokens are 64-character hex strings generated using random_bytes() — cryptographically secure and impossible to guess by brute force.

Frequently Asked Questions