Dub vs cutty.dev — a Dub alternative for those who are hesitating
Have you thought about Dub? See where it wins, and when a lighter alternative to Dub like cutty.dev provides clean, private links in the EU without unnecessary complexity.
Half of the internet will tell you: "take Dub, it's a modern trimmer, open source, beautiful dashboard". And you know what? In most cases, that is bad advice. Not because Dub is bad. But because you are burdening yourself with a tool built for someone completely different from you.
I will explain what I mean in a moment.
Who is Dub really for
Dub is not a "link shortener" in the sense that most people understand a shortener to be. It is a marketing platform. Link in bio, affiliate programs, conversion tracking, integration with Segment and Stripe, API for teams. A sales attribution machine.
If you are running growth in a SaaS startup, have affiliates to settle, and want to know that a click from a specific source turned into 49 PLN of revenue — Dub does this well. Seriously. It is his element.
It's just that this power comes at a price, and I'm not talking about the per-seat pricing (though that exists too, along with limits on clicks and links in the plans). I'm talking about what you get in the package, whether you want it or not:
- conversion tracking, which by nature profiles traffic. Cookie, fingerprint, mapping a human to a conversion.
- self-hosting, which sounds beautiful on a landing page, but in practice means Postgres, Tinybird (i.e., ClickHouse), Redis, and Vercel. This is not "docker run and you're done".
- infrastructure and tracking by default baked into the American ecosystem.
And here is my point of contention with this whole Dub advisory choir. Most people who think about it perhaps need one fifth of what Dub offers. The rest is ballast, for which you pay in time, privacy, and having to explain to the client where their data is going.
What cutty.dev does, and what Dub doesn't pretend to do
cutty.dev does not try to be an affiliate platform. It does one thing: shortens and manages links, with privacy built into its foundation instead of being tacked on somewhere in the settings as an option.
And that is the whole philosophical difference. Dub counts conversions. cutty counts clicks, but does not build a user profile in the process. The visitor's IP goes through a hash, there is no cookie tracking you across half the web, there is no fingerprinting. You get what you actually need: how many clicks, from where, which referrer. Without turning every clicker into a database record.
Practical consequence? Cookie banner simpler, GDPR risk assessment shorter. It is hard to defend data that you do not collect.
And speaking of data: with cutty, they reside in the EU. Not as a toggle in an enterprise plan, but as the default state. If your client, your lawyer, or your own policy says "data in the EU," then you have it right away. Without a DPA with an overseas provider, without checking which continent Tinybird is processing your traffic on.
And one more thing, trivial, but it makes a difference every day. There is no plan for four databases here. The things you actually use work right out of the box:
- replaceable link target. The same short address leads here today, and somewhere else tomorrow. You don't reprint flyers.
- branded suffix, so the link carries your name, not a random string of characters.
- QR code generated along with the link. For printing, for offline.
- statistics that leave no privacy debt.
Dry, side to side
| What | Dub | cutty.dev |
|---|---|---|
| Main goal | growth platform + affiliation | link shortening with privacy |
| Tracking | conversion + profiling | clicks, hashed IP |
| Data hosting | US ecosystem (default) | EU |
| Self-host | Postgres+ClickHouse+Redis | not required, works out of the box |
| Learning curve | high | minutes |
| When it wins | you settle affiliates and revenue | you want clean links without baggage |
One question and you have the answer
There is no need to overthink it for hours. Ask yourself one thing: are you settling the money through these links, or just directing traffic with them?
Do you settle accounts? Affiliates, commissions, revenue attribution to a specific source? Stick with Dub. It is its core and there is no need to overcomplicate things.
But if your real need sounds like "I want a nice short link with my brand, a QR code, the ability to change the destination, and honest statistics that don't spy on people," then Dub is simply overkill. In that case, cutty.dev gets the job done without an account for four different services and without sending data across the ocean.
The scenario I see most often: a freelancer or a three-person team plugs in Dub because it's "modern," uses maybe 15% of its features, and pays for it with increased complexity and the inconvenient task of answering client questions about where their data goes. In such a setup, a lighter tool is not a compromise. It is simply a more accurate choice.
How little is needed to have decent, private links, you will find out for yourself the fastest. Shorten your first link on cutty.dev and see how much of all that Dub apparatus you actually needed.