7 Things About Free URL Shorteners That Nobody Warns You About

I sent the same link to three Slack channels last Tuesday and realized I had zero way of knowing which one drove the 47 signups I saw that morning. This was a problem because I had 11 different links floating around, all pointing to the same landing page, but with different UTM parameters - and I was starting to suspect that some of them might be broken. Honestly, it was a bit of a wake-up call, since I'd been relying on these links for weeks without really thinking about the potential consequences of using a free URL shortener. Relying on Luck I was using a combination of curl and Python's requests library to generate these links, which worked fine for a while - but as the number of links grew, so did the complexity of my setup. I had a spreadsheet to keep track of everything, but it was getting harder and harder to keep it up to date. I was using a simple Bash script to generate the links, like this: curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://example.com/?utm_source=slack, but I