Your short links are permanent now — plus 5× the Free quota

A short link you printed on a flyer should still work three years later. A QR code on a product label shouldn’t quietly die when you forget to renew something.

That sounds obvious, but for a while we didn’t live up to it — we had our reasons at the time, and looking back none of them were good enough. We’ve spent the last few weeks fixing that, along with a few other things. Here’s what changed at toui.io in April.

1. Registered users’ short links are permanent

This is the big one. If you have an account — free or paid — every short link you create is kept forever.

Previously, free-plan links had a one-year TTL, and canceled subscriptions had a grace period before links stopped resolving. Both are gone. The rule is now simple:

• Anonymous (not logged in): link resolves for 30 days
• Logged in (any plan, any time): link resolves forever

Cancel your subscription, downgrade back to Free, stop using toui.io for a year — the links you created still work. We won’t hold them hostage.

This applies retroactively too. We’ve already cleaned up every existing registered-user link, so ones created under the old rules are now permanent as well.

Why this matters: short links outlive campaigns. You print them on signs, paste them into onboarding docs, ship them on physical products. The moment a link becomes something you don’t have to worry about, it becomes infrastructure you can actually build on.

2. The Free plan grew 5× — and now includes API access

Last week we rewrote what “Free” means on toui.io. The new Free plan gives you:

• 5,000 clicks per month (up from 1,000)
• API access — create, update, and fetch links programmatically
• 5,000 API calls per month with 500/day and 20 requests/minute
• 7 days of analytics
• Standard redirects, QR codes, and social preview cards

That’s generous enough for most personal use, side projects, and small launches. If you’ve been stuck with another service because its free tier didn’t give you enough headroom, we’d like you to try ours.

What’s still Pro-only:

• Custom short codes (like toui.io/launch instead of a random 6-character slug)
• Bulk upload (Excel import of hundreds of links at once)
• Advanced analytics (country, referer, device breakdowns; 90-day history)
• Team members (more than one person per workspace)
• Higher ceilings (50,000 clicks/month, 500,000 API calls/month on Pro)

We kept custom codes paid because they’re the feature that gets abused at scale — mostly by spammers claiming brand names they don’t own. Everything else, we want you to have.

3. Claim the links you created before signing up

toui.io has always let you shorten a URL without an account. You paste a long link on the home page, you get a short one, you move on. But if you decided to sign up later, those anonymous links used to be stranded — you couldn’t manage them, see click stats, or edit the destination.

Not anymore. If you shortened a link while logged out and then sign up or log in later on the same device, you’ll see a prompt to claim those recent anonymous links into your account. Confirm once, and they move over with full ownership — edit, stats, everything.

One honest caveat: this only works on the same device. If you created the link on computer A and then signed up on computer B, there’s no way for us to connect the two.

The shape of all this

None of these changes add a new feature tab or a new upsell. They make the thing you already use more trustworthy and more useful by default.

A URL shortener is basically a promise: this short string will keep pointing to that long one. If we can’t do that well, we shouldn’t have started at all.

Right under the shorten form on the homepage now, there’s a line: Your links stay with you. Always. It’s a commitment we’re making to you, and to ourselves.

If you’ve been meaning to try toui.io, now’s a good time.

Create a short link →

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Changes referenced in this post shipped between April 15 and April 22, 2026. Anonymous link TTL, plan quotas, and retention policy are defined in our pricing page and applied to both new and existing links. If you have questions about how your existing links are affected, email us at hello@toui.io.