The problem
A shortener is a perfect place to watch people
Every click passes through it. The usual ones log the address, fingerprint the browser, set a cross-site cookie and sell what they learn. The convenience is real; the price is hidden.
kaicorplabs.com / projects / linkup
project open source · self-hosted
A short link that does not watch who clicks it.
Most shorteners are surveillance with a convenience feature attached. This one keeps the convenience: it strips the tracking parameters from your destination, leaves the ones the page needs, and never reads the address of the person who clicked.
What it actually does
Strips the tracking, keeps the link working
?utm_source=newsletter&id=7 becomes ?id=7. Removing query parameters is easy; removing only the ones that track you and leaving the ones the page needs is the whole job.
Your data
Nobody is counted twice
No IP address is read — not logged, not hashed, not counted. No cookie for visitors. Counters are aggregate: total clicks and when the last one happened. Nothing that reconstructs who went where.
Honest limits
No per-visitor rate limit, on purpose
Because there is no identifiable visitor to limit. Writes are budgeted per signed-in account and PIN attempts per link. A limiter that quietly looked at addresses would make the promise above worthless.
The part that takes care
The User-Agent is read, in flight, when a link
has different destinations for iOS and Android — and it is never stored.
We say so here rather than let someone discover it, because a privacy
claim that turns out to be almost true is worse than none.
Run your own copy
docker pull ghcr.io/ulzuhan/linkup:latest # or: clone the repo and `docker compose up -d` # DEPLOYMENT.md in the repository covers the rest.
One static Go binary with the dashboard embedded in it, a SQLite file and nothing else — no database server, no frontend build. The image is built from a tagged commit by CI, scanned for known vulnerabilities before release, and published with provenance and an SBOM. Or use ours: open link.kaicorplabs.com and ask for an account — a person approves it.