Bitly's Free Plan in 2026: What You Actually Get

If you signed up for Bitly years ago, the free plan you remember is not the free plan that exists today. As of July 2026, here is what Bitly's own pricing page and free plan explainer list for a free account:

What you get	Bitly Free (2026)
Short links	5 per month
Custom back-halves	3 per month
QR codes	2 per month
Click analytics	None
Custom domains	None
UTM builder	Not included
API requests	1,000 per month

Two of those rows deserve a closer look, because they surprise almost everyone.

No click analytics means exactly that

Bitly's free plan tracks clicks, but it does not show them to you. Their own explainer states the free plan "does not include click or scan analytics for short links or QR Codes," and the pricing page lists "no historical data tracking." The clicks happen. The data exists. Seeing it starts at a paid plan, and even then the window is limited: 30 days of data on Core, 4 months on Growth, a year on Premium.

If the reason you shorten links is to know whether anyone clicked them, the free plan does not do the one thing you came for.

Your free links show ads to your audience

Since February 2025, links created on Bitly's free plan can show an interstitial page with advertising before visitors reach your destination. This is not a rumor. Bitly's own support center describes the behavior: free links and QR codes "may show a preview page with advertising before sending people to the destination," and the removal path they offer is upgrading to a paid plan.

Think about what that means in practice. You put a short link in your newsletter or on a poster, and some portion of the people who click it see an ad page first. Your click, their ad revenue, your reader's wait.

The limits have been tightening

The 5 links per month figure is current and official. Third-party reporting through 2025 tracked the free plan stepping down from higher limits to 10 links and then to 5, and Bitly maintains a support article titled "Why did my link limits change on my Free plan?" So the direction of travel is clear, even if you only trust the official numbers.

None of this is a scandal. Bitly is a large business and free tiers exist to convert people to paid plans. But if you are choosing a shortener today, you should know what the free tier actually is before you build a workflow on it.

What a free plan looks like without those limits

We build QCK, so read this part knowing that. Here is the same table for QCK's free plan, which you can verify on our pricing page:

What you get	QCK Free
Short links	25 per month, and every link stays active forever
Tracked clicks with full analytics	5,000 per month
Analytics history	6 months
Custom domains	1, with automatic SSL
UTM support	Included, plus a free UTM builder
Ads on your links	Never, on any plan
API access	Included
Webhooks	1 endpoint
Password protection and link expiration	Included

The philosophy difference is simple: the free plan should be a small version of the real product, not a demo with the useful parts removed. Analytics is the product, so free accounts get real analytics: referrers, devices, locations, city-level geography, all in real time, with raw data export.

And links never show ads. Not on Free, not anywhere. A redirect should take your visitor to the destination, full stop.

The honest caveats

QCK is newer and smaller than Bitly. If you need 2FA-heavy enterprise procurement, a decade of brand recognition, or off-the-shelf integrations with every tool you own, Bitly's paid tiers may still be the right call, and our comparison pages try to be straight about that.

But if the question is "which free plan actually lets me shorten links and see who clicked," the answer in 2026 is not complicated. Check the numbers yourself, on both pricing pages, and pick the one that does the job.

All Bitly figures verified against bitly.com in July 2026. If Bitly changes its plans, the links above will show the current numbers.