Why host in the European Union
The decision regarding where the server is located may seem technical. For you as a user, it specifically determines who can access your data and under what legal basis the tool you use operates.
Most popular online tools — including link shorteners — run on American servers. This is technically fine, as long as you don’t start asking “what happens to that data next.” cutty.dev works differently.
The entire database remains in the European Union
The entire database — your account, your links, click statistics, encrypted passwords for protected links — resides on servers in the European Union. Nothing is replicated to the USA, China, or other jurisdictions. Backups remain in the same region.
Practical significance:
- No data transfers to third countries — if your data protection officer asks about GDPR transfers, the answer is "none".
- Standard contractual clauses are sufficient — you don't need to add extra contract layers for US service providers.
- We operate under European law — with the same informational obligations and the same rights to request deletion.
No page tracking
Most marketing tools add third-party scripts to your site — analytics, marketing automation, heatmaps. Each of them can read what the user is doing on your site and use it further.
cutty.dev uses only its own scripts. We collect click statistics ourselves, in our database, without selling data. There are no trackers that you wouldn't know about.
If a visitor clicks your link → an entry in our database with an encrypted IP address hash, country, device, and source. Nothing goes to a third party. You see statistics in the dashboard, we see aggregated numbers for monitoring — and that’s it.
What about translations into 25 languages?
A reasonable question — we use an AI model to translate interface texts into Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Hebrew, and all other languages. Does this mean we send data to an external provider?
No. Translations are performed locally, using our own AI model running on our infrastructure. No text from the interface has ever left our network. Open-source models today achieve quality levels that were unimaginable two years ago — without the need to pay for APIs or transfer data.
Practice — what does it mean in use
If you run a business in Poland, Germany, France, or anywhere in the EU, where GDPR compliance matters (and it should for any company that processes customer data), cutty.dev is for you. Standardly, without needing to add "EU only" to the pricing.
If you're a freelancer or run a small business — you don't even need to consider it. cutty.dev doesn't require any additional documentation from you. It simply operates in compliance with the laws that already apply to you.
What DOES NOT change
Hosting in the EU is not an excuse for inaction. Loading a page from Warsaw takes half a second. From Berlin, Prague, Madrid — similarly.
Hosting in the EU is not a limitation of features. Full functionality (links, passwords, QR codes, statistics, 25 languages, 4 login methods) is available. Just more private.
If you have specific questions
Data protection officers, external auditors, compliance professionals — write to hello@cutty.dev. I reply the same day and can provide specific answers about the server region, backups, and administrative access.
The rest — just shorten the first link without an account. We'll figure out the rest as we go.