Terms of service

1. What the service is

You give us a web address, we give you a short link and a QR code that point at it. You don't need an account to do that. A free account adds custom slugs, click counts, and a place to manage everything you've made.

Free links live forever. We don't expire them, we don't delete them for inactivity, and we don't hold them hostage later. Free links show a short interstitial page before the destination — that's how the free tier pays for itself.

2. Payments, and what "once" means

Paid upgrades are one-time payments. $3 unlocks every premium feature on a single link for the life of that link. $12 unlocks them on every link on your account — the ones you've already made and the ones you haven't — for the life of the account. There is no subscription, no renewal, no recurring charge, and no card on file waiting to bill you next year.

Two things sit outside those prices, each a separate one-time add-on: API and bulk access, and connecting a custom domain (see section 5).

Payments are processed by Stripe. Prices are in US dollars. Buying $3 and later buying $12 is fine — the $3 stays where you put it, and we don't credit it against the $12. If something goes genuinely wrong with a purchase, email us and we'll sort it out; refunds are handled case by case, and a refund reverts whatever the payment unlocked.

3. Fair use on unlimited

"Unlimited" means unlimited for a person, not for a script. The fair-use limit is 500 new links per month per account. It resets on the 1st. In four years of normal use you will never see it; if you do, email us and tell us what you're building.

Automated or bulk link creation isn't part of the $12 — programmatic access is the separate API add-on, with its own key and its own limits. Scraping the create form to get around that is not a clever workaround, it's a reason to close the account.

4. Acceptable use

Don't point our links at anything that would make us the problem. Specifically, no:

• phishing, credential harvesting, or impersonating anyone;
• malware, ransomware, drive-by downloads, or exploit kits;
• spam — unsolicited bulk email, SMS, or messaging campaigns using our links;
• content that is illegal where it's hosted or where it's read, including anything sexualising minors;
• harassment, targeted abuse, doxxing, or incitement to violence;
• material you don't have the rights to distribute, or links whose only job is to route around someone else's copyright;
• cloaking — showing us one destination and your visitors another;
• attempts to break, overload, or probe the service, or to evade rate limits, bot checks, or a previous suspension.

5. Screening, reports, and links we switch off

We check every destination against Google Safe Browsing when the link is created, and we re-check live links periodically — destinations turn malicious after they're shortened, which is the whole trick. Every interstitial names the destination domain, and every link can be previewed without being followed by adding + to it.

Every interstitial and every dead link carries a Report this link control. Reports go to a queue a person works through. A link that gets flagged by our screening, or reported independently by enough people, stops working while it's reviewed — a hold, not a verdict.

We can disable a link or an account that breaks section 4, without notice and without a refund. One bad wave of phishing gets our domain blocklisted and breaks every link every other customer has ever made, including the paid ones. We take that seriously. If you think we got your link wrong, email abuse@itsonthis.link — a human reads it.

6. Custom domains

Connecting a domain you already own costs $10, once, and covers verification, SSL, and routing for as long as the domain points at us. It does not include registering the domain name, and we don't sell domain registration. You keep paying your registrar; that's between you and them. If the domain lapses or you remove it, its links stop resolving there — we'll never hand your hostname to someone else.

7. Your content and your account

The destinations you shorten are yours. We store them so we can redirect to them, show them on preview and interstitial pages, and screen them for abuse — nothing else. You can delete your links and your account at any time from the account page, and export your data before you go.

Deleting a link stops it resolving. Anyone who saved or printed that short code will get our 404 page.

8. No warranty, and the limit of what we owe you

The service is provided as-is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied. We work hard to keep redirects fast and up, and we still can't promise the service will never be interrupted, never lose a click statistic, or always be error-free. We're not responsible for what's at the other end of a link — we didn't write it and we don't host it.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything connected with the service is limited to what you have actually paid us — which for most people is nothing, and at most is $12 plus any add-ons. We're not liable for indirect or consequential losses, including lost profits or lost business.

9. Changes to these terms

We'll update this page if the service changes, and the date at the top will say when. We will never use a terms update to turn a one-time payment into a subscription. If a change matters to people who have paid, we'll email them about it.

10. Getting in touch

Abuse and takedowns: abuse@itsonthis.link. Everything else: support@itsonthis.link. Both go to a real ticket queue, not a personal inbox that someone forgets to check.