Self-Hosted Stack

Shlink: A Self-Hosted Bitly Alternative for URL Shortening

Bitly's free plan gives you basic short links but gates custom domains and full analytics history behind paid tiers starting around $8/month. Self-hosting the shortener means the domain was always yours anyway — and you lose Bitly's link-in-bio pages and QR-code UI polish in the trade.

Bitly's free plan lets you create short links and see basic click counts, but a custom branded domain and longer analytics retention are gated behind paid plans starting around $8/month (Basic), with the Growth plan around $29/month for more links and deeper analytics.

What a branded domain actually costs you

The irony with a link shortener SaaS is that you're paying monthly for the privilege of using a domain you'd otherwise already own. Bitly's free tier pushes you onto their shared bit.ly domain; getting your own short domain in front of it is one of the first things that requires a paid plan.

What Shlink gives you instead

Shlink is an open-source, self-hosted URL shortener with a full REST API and an optional web client for managing links without touching the API directly. Since it's self-hosted, your own domain is the shortener domain from the start — no separate custom-domain tier to unlock. Unlimited short URLs, unlimited tracked clicks, and detailed per-link analytics (referrers, browsers, geolocation) with no retention window cutting off older data. Docker deployment, and it runs comfortably alongside the rest of this stack on the same small VPS.

The catch, and it's a real one

Shlink is a URL shortener, not a link-in-bio or marketing platform. Bitly's link-in-bio pages, branded QR code design tools, and team/role management UI don't have an equivalent here — Shlink does generate QR codes via its API, but there's no polished design UI wrapped around it like Bitly's. There's also no multi-user permission system out of the box; it's built around a single API key model, which is fine for one person or a small team sharing access loosely, but not a fit if you need per-user roles and audit trails. If you need branded QR design and link-in-bio pages, Bitly's paid tiers are buying real product. If you just need a fast, private link shortener on a domain you already control, Shlink does that for free.

I run this on the same Vultr box as the rest of this stack — see the full cost roll-up for how it all fits together.

Disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Vultr. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to providers I actually use.

Kimai: A Self-Hosted Toggl/Harvest Alternative for Time Tracking

Toggl's free plan caps out at 5 users and strips out reporting features. Past that you're paying per seat for a stopwatch — a self-hosted tracker removes the seat count entirely, though you lose Toggl's native mobile apps and one-click integrations.

OpnForm: A Self-Hosted Typeform Alternative

Typeform's free plan caps you at 10 responses a month. Past that you're paying around $25/month (billed annually) for a response counter to go away — a self-hosted form builder removes the counter entirely, though it won't plug into as many payment/integration providers out of the box.

Excalidraw: A Self-Hosted Miro/FigJam Alternative for Whiteboarding

Miro and FigJam's free tiers cover a handful of boards. Past that you're paying per seat for real-time collaboration a self-hosted whiteboard gives you for free — with a smaller feature set, and I'll say plainly where it falls short.

GlitchTip: A Self-Hosted Sentry Alternative for Error Tracking

Sentry's Team plan is $29/month for 50,000 errors — fine until a bad deploy or a noisy dependency blows past that in a day. GlitchTip speaks the same Sentry SDK protocol with none of the per-event metering.