About CUQ.IN

Why this exists.

CUQ.IN is a short link and a free API. It's been online since 2021. It exists because the URL shortener category had drifted somewhere ugly. Free plans that inject interstitial ads. Dashboards you have to sign up for just to get a redirect. Click data quietly resold to ad networks. None of that is needed. A short link is a lookup and a counter.

Paste a URL, get a clean cuq.in address, done. No account, no cookies, no tracking, ever. If you write code, the same thing is one HTTP call. 10,000 links a day per API key, free. The public API is documented at /api. Boring on purpose.

There's no company behind this. CUQ.IN is a personal project, not a startup. No funding round, no team, no plan to become something else. As long as the domain renews and the server bill is paid, it stays online.

How it stays free.

Free forever means what it says. No paid tier planned, no pro dashboard sitting in a branch. A small group of sponsors covers the hosting. That's the whole business model. No ads, no upsells, no data for sale.

Privacy is the same story. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party analytics, no referrer log. Google Analytics came off this month and it isn't coming back. What the server actually records when you click a link is spelled out on the security page, including retention and what a click log looks like.

Pace is slow. Bugs get fixed when we find them. Features ship when they're worth shipping. There's no roadmap deck because there's no team to circulate one to. If a change would compromise privacy to grow faster, we skip it.

Small ways to help.

Three things help, in rough order of usefulness.

Sponsor a slot. If your product benefits from a clean, private web, a logo on the landing page keeps the redirect free for everyone else. Reach us at [email protected].

Report bad links. If someone is shortening a phishing page or a malware URL through CUQ.IN, tell us. The security page has the details, or just mail [email protected] with the short code.

Tell a developer. Word of mouth from someone who already uses the API beats any ad we couldn't afford anyway.

That's the whole page. If you want the technical side, the security page has the specifics and /api covers the code. Anything else, mail [email protected] and it reaches us directly.