Does Bitly have a free plan? What you get, and where it stops

Yes, Bitly has a free plan. On their published pricing it gives you 5 short links a month, 3 custom back-halves, 2 QR codes a month, and unlimited clicks — and the plan card is labelled "With ads".

What the free plan does not include

The limits people hit are less about volume than about what is missing entirely:

• No data history. Click and scan data starts on Core at $10/month, with 30 days of it. On free there is no history to look back at.
• No branded links and no custom domain. A custom domain is included from Growth at $29/month.
• No data export, which starts on Growth.
• No device or city-level analytics. Those appear on Premium at $199/month. Country data starts on Core, as a top-ten list.
• No second user. User management, group permissions and SSO are Enterprise features, so any budget below that is a single-person account.

Five links a month, in practice

Five is enough to try the product and not much else. One campaign with a link per channel — email, two social posts, a paid ad — is your month. It is a trial with no time limit rather than a plan you run anything on, which is a reasonable thing for Bitly to offer; it is just worth knowing before you build a workflow on it.

What the same money buys elsewhere

For context, Urlicer's free plan is 500 links a month, unlimited QR codes you can style, 25,000 tracked clicks, 30 days of history, and no ads. Country, city, device, browser and referrer breakdowns are on every plan including that one — what scales with price here is how long the history is kept, not whether you are allowed to see it.

The fuller side-by-side, including the paid tiers, is in Bitly alternatives compared.

Bitly figures above are from their pricing page as published in September 2026 — check bitly.com/pages/pricing for current numbers.

Want a free plan you can actually run a campaign on? Shorten a link free. No signup, and every link gets a QR code and click analytics.