Rebrandly vs cutty.dev — branded links for free or via subscription
Rebrandly alternative without monthly limits: branded links, EU-based hosting, and hashed IPs. Find out when it's worth paying for a subscription and when it isn't.
You add another link and a window with the pricing pops up. Want to check who is clicking? Some statistics are behind a higher plan. A second domain? Upgrade. This is usually the moment when people type "rebrandly alternative" into Google. No beating around the bush: below is a concrete comparison of where money actually goes in Rebrandly and when cutty.dev makes sense, and when it doesn't.
What you are really paying for
Rebrandly stands on monthly limits. The free plan is a finite pool of links and clicks, one domain, and reduced reports. Higher tiers unlock additional domains, export, and teams. A perfectly sensible model, you just pay for increased usage rather than new features.
Three places where the bill swells:
- Link to currency. Every shortened URL eats up space in the pool. Campaigns, QR codes on flyers, social media links, and the pool shrinks faster than it seems.
- Statistics behind a paywall. You can see raw clicks, but breakdowns by time, exports, or longer history require a paid plan.
- Domains after the art. The second and third branded extension are additional price tiers.
Nothing dishonest. But as a sole proprietorship or a small team, you pay a subscription for a ceiling that you almost never touch.
Where cutty.dev does things differently
You don't buy "slots for links" here. A branded suffix, meaning that part after the slash which you type yourself, is not included in any pool. Instead of rb.gy/x7k2 you have cutty.dev/promo-wiosna and you don't look nervously at the counter.
The second difference lies under the hood. Rebrandly is an American SaaS with global infrastructure and its typical traffic tracking. cutty.dev hosts in the European Union and does not store the raw IP of the person clicking. The address ends up in the database hashed, so you have an entry counter without building anyone's profile. For a campaign report, this is completely sufficient. For GDPR, it is the difference between "we store visitor data" and "we don't have it at all."
The third thing you will appreciate only after some time. Changing the destination. You printed cutty.dev/menu on a board in the establishment, and after a month, you are changing the PDF provider for the menu. On the free Rebrandly plan, editing the destination URL can be blocked. Here, you simply change the target and that's it: the same short address, the same QR, a different page underneath.
Coolly
| What | Rebrandly (free) | cutty.dev |
|---|---|---|
| Branded endings | yes, counted towards the pool | yes, unlimited |
| Custom domain | one for free | short cutty.dev domain included |
| Raw IP in logs | usually recorded | hashed, not stored |
| Hosting | global | EU |
| Destination replacement | limited on free | unrestricted |
| QR Code | yes | yes, from the same link |
No "Rebrandly is bad, Cutty is good." Do you need a large custom brand domain, enterprise integrations, and team roles? Rebrandly in a paid plan is a mature tool. The only question is whether you really need it, or if you are paying for overkill.
When what
Use Rebrandly when you have a recognizable branded domain and want to host everything on it (e.g., twojafirma.link), work in a team with extensive roles, drive API usage at scale, or if the subscription is already part of your marketing budget.
cutty.dev as a rebrandly alternative comes in when you are working solo or in a small team and don't want to monitor monthly pools, you care about the privacy of clickers and hosting in the EU, you generate many QR codes on prints (where the target must be changeable after printing) or you simply don't want to explain another subscription to your accountant for something that was supposed to be simple.
Test week before you pay
A seven-day experiment. Shorten with one tool what you are already publishing: bio, one campaign, one QR code on printed material. Then count how many links you actually created and whether you even came close to the free plan limit. For most solo creators, the result is two, maybe three links. In other words, you are paying for a sense of buffer, not for usage.
The cheapest branded endpoint is the one you don't count in any package. On cutty.dev you can make it for free. But first, do this one week of testing, because it might turn out that any free plan will be enough for you.