Ship branded short links as a feature of your product

What you would otherwise have to build

The redirector is the easy part until it is not. It has to answer in single-digit milliseconds worldwide, survive a campaign spike without a cold database read on the hot path, cache negatives so a crawler on a dead slug does not cost you a thousand lookups, and never turn a brief backend outage into permanently broken links.

Certificates for customer domains are the part that quietly consumes a quarter. Every commercial self-hosted shortener script on the market as of August 2026 leaves automatic SSL for customer hostnames unsolved — it is the single hardest piece of the problem, and it involves ownership validation, issuance rate limits, renewal delegation and a status model your support team can explain.

Then analytics: an event per click, geography, device and referrer parsing, unique counting that does not store identities, retention windows, and queries that stay fast at a hundred million rows. None of this is your product, and all of it is a permanent maintenance surface.

The integration, concretely

Create a workspace per customer, issue a scoped API key, and call the REST API from your backend. Creating a link is one POST with a destination and an optional slug; up to a hundred links go in a single bulk call. Analytics comes back as summaries, time series, breakdowns by any dimension and a streaming CSV export, so you can render statistics inside your own interface rather than linking users away to someone else's dashboard.

Customer domains are API objects too. POST a hostname, read back the DNS records it needs, and show them in your own onboarding flow with your own copy. Subscribe to the domain lifecycle webhook and your interface updates the moment the certificate is active, instead of polling a status endpoint on a timer.

Everything is described by an OpenAPI specification generated from the same schemas the API validates against, so client generation is reliable and the reference cannot drift from the implementation. Version one is frozen: additive changes only, breaking changes only ever at a new version path.

• ✓Bearer keys scoped per workspace, with per-key permission lists
• ✓Six hundred requests per minute by default, with limit headers on every response
• ✓Cursor pagination that stays stable while records are being created
• ✓One error shape everywhere: code, message and documentation URL
• ✓Webhooks with signed payloads and five retries before an endpoint is marked failing

Two ways to package it for your customers

The invisible integration keeps everything inside your product: users never see another brand, they just get short links and click charts in your interface, drawn from the API. This suits products where links are a feature — schedulers, CRMs, email tools, commerce platforms, event software.

The delegated integration hands power users the full dashboard under your brand instead, on your hostname and in your colours, with the plans and prices you set. It costs you nothing to build and gives you an upsell tier that would otherwise be a roadmap item, and the two models can run side by side: basic links in your interface, the full studio for customers who pay for it.

Cost model and operational fit

Pricing follows usage rather than headcount: your platform plan sets domains, workspaces and tracked clicks per month, and if you charge your customers for link features, the platform takes a percentage of that revenue rather than a fee per workspace. A customer who never opens the feature costs you nothing.

Operationally, redirect availability and certificate renewals stop being your on-call surface. Your engineers keep the parts that differentiate the product, and the parts that only differentiate when they break become someone else's pager.