TinyURL VS QR Code Spot

TinyURL's answer

TinyURL has been running continuously since January 2002, which makes it the first notable URL shortening service and one of the oldest still operating. For a link shortener that longevity is the product, not trivia: a short link is only useful for as long as it still resolves, and links created here don't expire.

Three things set it apart day to day:

• Human and bot clicks are reported separately. Most shorteners report raw click totals that quietly include crawlers and link-preview bots, so reported traffic reads higher than the real audience. Separating them means the numbers can be trusted for attribution.
• Destinations stay editable after a link is published. A link already printed on packaging or posted to social can be repointed without reissuing it.
• A permanent free tier, not a trial - 30 links a month, one branded domain, links that never expire.

QR Code Spot's answer:

Printed codes never die. On most QR sites, an editable code stops working when a trial or plan ends. On QR Code Spot, codes over a plan’s limit lock: they keep opening, you just can’t change where they go. Every design is also test-scanned before download, and scan stats never record who scanned.

TinyURL's answer

Three practical reasons, depending on what you need:

• You want attribution you can trust. Analytics cover clicks over time, referrer, geography, device, OS, browser and language, retained for two years, with bot traffic separated out.
• You want your own brand on the link. Bring your own domain or subdomain on any plan, with up to three branded domains on paid tiers.
• You want links that outlive the campaign. Twenty-four years of continuous operation, and a free tier that doesn't expire, matter when a link is printed on something you can't reprint.

Pricing starts free and goes to $9/month billed annually ($11 month-to-month) for 125 links a month with unlimited tracked clicks. Bulk plans handle 50,000 links a month for agencies and high-volume senders, and there's a REST API for automating the whole lifecycle.

QR Code Spot's answer:

The free plan is genuinely usable: 10 editable codes with no scan limits, no ads on scans, and no expiry. Static codes need no account at all. Paid plans start at $4 a month, and it also covers things most QR generators don’t, like payment QR codes (UPI, Pix, SEPA, PromptPay, VietQR), badge-style designs in QR Studio, and QR guest requests for restaurants, hotels and salons.

TinyURL's answer

• Marketing teams running campaigns across several channels who need per-link attribution rather than a single lumped traffic figure
• Social media managers and creators working inside character limits, who want a branded link rather than a generic one
• Agencies managing links for multiple clients, each on its own branded domain
• Developers automating link creation and analytics through the REST API
• Enterprises needing SLA-backed uptime and compliance support
• Educational Institutions
• The healthcare industry

It also has a long tail of individual users who simply need a link shortened, which the free tier covers without an account upgrade.

QR Code Spot's answer:

Small businesses, events and venues: cafés and restaurants putting codes on tables and menus, hotels and guesthouses, salons and spas, shops, and event organisers. People who print a code once and need it to keep working.

TinyURL's answer

Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched TinyURL in January 2002 so he could link directly to newsgroup postings, which at the time had long and unwieldy addresses. It was the first notable URL shortening service, and it arrived years before shortening became a category.

Twitter used TinyURL as its default shortener until May 2009, which put it in front of a mass audience during the period when character limits made short links essential.

Since then it's grown from a single-purpose utility into a link management platform: branded domains, click analytics with two years of retained history, editable destinations, QR codes, bulk creation and a REST API. It now serves over 4.4 million registered users and has created billions of links.

TinyURL's answer

TinyURL is a cloud-hosted web application, accessible from any browser with no install. Its public interface is a REST API (v2.4.2) published as an OpenAPI 3.0 specification and authenticated with bearer tokens, covering link creation, editing, destination changes, analytics retrieval and bulk batch processing.

QR Code Spot's answer:

Cloudflare Workers and D1, plain JavaScript, HTML and CSS. QR codes are drawn in the browser, so your photos and spreadsheets stay on your device.

TinyURL's answer

Twitter used TinyURL as its default URL shortener until May 2009.