Bit.ly's shady business model | Hacker News Reader

Bit.ly's shady business model

ozkatz.github.io

78 pointsozkatz57 comments

This is absurd. I was the CTO at a startup with a small budget and looked into bit.ly. You know what I did? I looked at their damn TOS, because when you're running a business you look at ALL your third party service's TOS's. ESPECIALLY the free ones.

It was quite nice of bit.ly to voluntarily cut your bill. Instead of learning something valuable about how the market works you've shifted the blame to someone else.

You would do well to reflect on these events and ask yourself why instead of accepting your own error here you've pushed the blame onto bit.ly.

But... why can't they just give me free things? I don't see a problem with building my business atop the back of another and sharing 0% of the profit. /s

I've also updated the post to reflect this: I don't mind paying. Its the policy of not leaving me a choice to do so by not allowing me to export my data and go elsewhere that bothers me.

How would they realistically "allow" you to export your data?

Would it require extra programmer effort and cost to develop such export functionality? If they didn't invest the money to build that capability, why would they want to? What's the ROI for them to do it?

It took several years for GMail to have mailbox export capabilities. Some team somewhere has to write and test all that code.

Is there even data to export? It appears to me the OP would need the bit.ly domain to preserve the links, otherwise he could just scrape all the URLs and find a way to redirect them.

He used his own custom URL, which is cleverer because he can take it with him, but not so clever because ... reason we are having this conversation now, you have to think this through! I've never used Bit.ly's hosted service, but he already said there's no way to export the data. So, hopefully clear there is some data, Bit.ly has a list of shared URLs from his customers, and they've populated a database with some short codes in order to redirect them.

They are (correct me if I'm not understanding how this service works) the only ones in a position to know which short URLs are already used and which ones are not.

So, if the list of short codes is short enough that he can search it in a couple of days and follow all of the links, then that's obviously what he should be doing rather than having public gripe time on HN.

(Then again, if he pays them just once he gets a decent bit of extra time, and they get paid for providing the service when his business was too small to justify him bringing his own infrastructure. Win-win?)

You have already used paid-tier resources, and they are simply asking you to reimburse them for that.

And that is why you vet free services extensively. There's a reason they're free. Often times lock in is the way they do things.

Sure it sounds unfair when you say "they won't let ME export MY data", but it sounds different when you say "we'll provide a FREE service for you, up to a point, but when it gets reasonably large or commercial you promise to give us your business."

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

That's a step in the right direction, but the piece still reads as though you're trying to shift the blame for your mistake.

Removing any "shady" or "not cool" accusations (and implicitly leaving them to the reader), and just adopting a neutral "Hey devs, make sure you read the ToS, 'cause I didn't and look what happened..." tone would make your piece basically unassailable.

I completely agree with you, but it would be nice of bit.ly to give guys some time to think, few days are obviously not enough

Nope.

Bitly is being pretty damn shady. Their home page says "sign up for free" and doesn't mention pricing anywhere, and their signup page doesn't mention paid options.

People don't have time to read every single terms of service. ToS are basically there to stop dicks from being dicks and then suing you, not to bury how you are going to hold someone's business hostage.

The "sign up for free" link on the home page is for individual users, not for companies/brands. If you click the "Learn More" button in the "Bitly Brand Tools" section (which is far more prominent than the sign up link) the following pages do have a "Pricing" link in the top navigation bar (and that's presumably the signup they would need to use to make use of the "brand tools" features).

And yes most people do not read "every single terms of service" - but a business would be foolish to have so much of their business rely on another without reading the other's ToS. A look at Swayy's home page says "By connecting, you are agreeing to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy." - funny they expect their users to agree to their ToS but can't be bothered to read ones for services they use.

As for bit.ly holding them "hostage" that's something Swayy should have considered before choosing them (or anyone else). What was Swayy's plan if bit.ly went out of business?

If you click on "pricing" you will see this: "STARTING AT $995/month". I think that's pretty clear. Maybe the service changed and they started to charge and they didn't notify you.

Link: https://bitly.com/a/pricing

And a quote:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Robert J. Hanlon.

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Edit (please read this)

Oz Kats said: "as of april last year when we signed up for bit.ly that page was nowhere to be found"

My reply:

That actually changes everything.

As I understand, they are not retaining your data, but will pull the plug on a service you now depend and are not offering migration options, am I correct? This is certainly an awful business practice it could be illegal, but there is a problem.

At the time they failed to communicate the pricing so you started using their service, judging it would be free. If they started to charge, you could just pay or move to another provider, but the very model of their tool makes it impossible for you to truly "migrate" to another provider since the links are widespread, this isn't exactly their fault (nor yours).

If they are charging you 995$ just because they know you are out of options you might have a case, but that's so time/money consuming I would advise you to just do your best to migrate the widespread links.

Best of luck

there's no link to that page before signing up... no link from the home page that i can see. I think that's pretty unclear

"Learn More" then "Pricing" or any page that shows the product has the pricing link on the navigation bar.

The pricing link isn't at the top of the home page, but it is at the top of 'Features' and 'Get Started.' More over, the list of clients at the bottom includes some large companies. Surely you must realize that someone is paying for something here.

I think Facebook and Google have lulled us into a false, unquestioning expectation that online services are free; when really we should be suspicious of any company claiming to offer a free service.

as of april last year when we signed up for bit.ly that page was nowhere to be found

That actually changes everything.

Best of luck

Let's see what Internet Archive says about this. In April 2013 the Bitly homepage looked like this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130401021533/https://bitly.com/

It had the new brand in use, and it had a "You Business?" link to Enterprise site:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130404123817/http://www.enterpr...

The enterprise site advices you to contact them for pricing.

For reference the ToS from March 2013 is here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130320100810/http://bitly.com/p...

It still contains the clause outlining that the free version is for non-commercial use only.

I feel it's a little underhanded call it shady while simultaneous admitting the information was there in a document you opted not to read as you built your business around it.

I agree. The post title is very unfortunately worded. There's nothing shady about bit.ly adhering to, and expecting the OP to adhere to, their clearly-stated business policies.

I really don't see the problem here. Did you have access to the export feature before and now it's been removed? If you did, you don't have any backups?

Building a business around a 3rd party service that you are not paying for without carefully reading the TOS or doing some research beforehand is a big mistake. The least you could do is save a copy of all the data for easy (read: reduced pain) migration in case it's ever needed.

It seems the article writer not only did not read the TOS before signing up, but also make a critical error of thinking they could use the service for free at the tune of 50,000 links per month!

They built their company around another company's free service, ignored the fact that Bitly has to make money off their service somehow (guess what, they charge for high volume customers), and then became outraged when bitly told them they needed to pay up.

If link shortening is so integral to the business, why have they not implemented their own link shortener?

Quit complaining you got something for free and abused it, and now they want you to pay them for the apparently critical service they provide you with.

So basically you used a service that costs money, you didn't pay any, and now you're peeved that they'd actually like to collect?

> They could have dropped any other amount they wanted

They probably told you "the usual amount". Are there any grounds for suspicion that they are quoting you some outrageous price?

I don't see what could qualify as "shady" here.

And btw: from a very possible point of view they might think you didn't forget to read the small print, you deliberately tried to defraud them by acting as if you were non-commercial.

They can't look inside your head.

I'm amazed that they thought it was a smart business decision to rely on a free bit.ly account (with their own domain!) instead of running their own URL shortener. Yourls (https://yourls.org/) is free and open source, and has been around for years. There's an excellent reason why every major publisher operates their own URL shortening service, and this article demonstrates it perfectly.

The article has been updated to say "My biggest gripe with bit.ly is not their pricing, it's their policy of not letting users export their data and by that locking their users in." - so basically in addition to building his business around violating terms of service he couldn't be bothered to read he also never considered vendor lock-in.

When choosing any technology or service one shouldn't expect there to always be an easy way to switch. Vendor lock-in is something that needs to be considered and investigated before deciding a technology or service. With the author's updated "biggest gripe" it sounds like he would consider it Oracle's fault if he built his business using OracleDB and then decided to switch to MongoDB.

I never heard of Swayy before reading this article - but it did a lot more to convince me to never consider using it than convince me of anything "shady" on bit.ly's end.

Bit.ly could have just stopped redirecting your urls, waited for you to figure out why and contact them. They didn't do that. They contacted you and gave you a chance to fix what you are doing wrong. Plus they probably could bill you for past traffic but they aren't doing that either.

Wait, so you've been actively violating their terms of service for months, and now you're mad that they want you to start paying for the commercial use you've already been doing?

Explain to me again how bit.ly are the bad guys here?

Sounds like your mistake. If your business relies on link shortening, you should identify it early in the process and build your own.

I don't use personally and every now and then I examine the reasoning of delegating parts of my products to 3rd party providers.

If your product is taking off, learn from your mistake of not following the ToS and just build your own in-house URL shortener.

Very true. Not shying away from my responsibility. I'm mostly to blame. And still - can't say I like bit.ly's way of doing business.

Really, you are more than "mostly" to blame; you are "completely" to blame. You're also bordering on defamation, so you should probably reconsider your article.

As I said on the comment on your site: > Nothing is "deep within" the TOS, if you do what you are supposed to do when using it as part of your business model, and read it in it's entirety.

You completely and solely failed in your due diligence.

You should really put the article up again... it is disgusting when people won't stand for their actions and try to hide what they did. I would very much prefer you give an apology at the top of your text, rather than trying to sneak away by removing your original writing.

Fortunately, Archive.org has the original:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140612150420/http://ozkatz.git...

I think it's perfectly reasonable that bit.ly would want to charge for heavy usage of their service and are unwilling to spend their resources helping another company migrate away from their service because they decided they don't want to pay for it. It's unfair to call out bit.ly as having a shady business model when you build a service that relies on a third party and don't even bother to do you due diligence and find out the licensing costs!

Create a script to follow those urls and migrate and byebye?

I thought about this, but they still have the problem that the old links shared won't resolve.

EDIT: mseebach is right, they just have to copy the link format

Why not? They have their own domain that they'll presumably point to a new service.

If you sign in, under the "Settings" -> "Branded Short Domain" section, there are two links.

One says "Personal", and lets you continue along without pricing being mentioned.

Then there's a "Business" link that forces you talk with Bitly -- I'm assuming because you would have immediately been notified that it cost money.

You abused a service, and now you're upset because you can't scam them. Cool.

So the only place that this mysterious information was documented (apart from Bit.ly's website) was in the TOS. In other words, the contract governing the relationship between the two businesses. Who would ever expect to look in such a place?

Are you using a paid bit.ly account? They have instructions on getting a list of all of the links you have created here: http://support.bitly.com/knowledgebase/articles/241695--paid... It also seems like it should be straight forward crawl all of the links your users have created to build your own database of all of the URLs.

If you are not already a paying customer then I think they are letting you off easy. You are basing a business on a freemium product and the free part just ran out.

On the other hand: What if bit.ly shut down operations / went bankrupt / lost all their data? Would that change anything for you?

This is like bit.ly shutting down. Except! If you pay a fee, they won't shut down after all.

But I do agree that hiding pricing in small print is uncool.

It's one thing to not read the whole TOS for services you consume and pay for, but ignoring it when using it commercially? Don't blame them and call them shady. They have to pay their employees and server costs to provide you the service.

Time to scrape the URLs and resolve them yourself!

If you keep track of either the short URL or the long URL somewhere on your end, you can get the other part using bitly's link API: http://dev.bitly.com/links.html and the associated metrics with the link metrics API: http://dev.bitly.com/link_metrics.html -- Once you have that, you can write a simple app (or use any of the free ones out there) to provide the same service.

Or honestly, just pay the $700 if it's not worth the dev investment and provides a significant value to your service.

Glad the OP is coming clean saying it's their fault, but calling bitly shady for doing what they said they were going to do for the money that they said they were going to charge (or not charge) seems like a low blow.

Not sure why they don't just brute force their data out. Back when Google was hiding Google I/O redeem codes with goo.gl links, I brute forced thousands of links out of that shortener, just using 20 lines of bash script. I was just trying random codes and got one that led to a URL once per second or so.

So I could pull down 300k links in a few days. Their case would be a lot quicker because it sounds like they have all the valid bit.ly links, just not where they lead to.

I'll tell you what's shady, using a non-commercial service heavily for commercial gain and then expected them to roll-over and help you bugger off else where.

Although it sucks I wouldn't claim it's a shady business model. It seems more like the obvious one - make the custom URL option paid and they have their pricing clearly laid out - https://bitly.com/a/pricing

And you have a few days to crawl the URLs and see what you get.

the way the site is structured, the pricing only seems to be for the Bitly Brand Tools. There doesn't seem any other pricing info for just link shortening

This piece would come off a lot better with a "Hey startups did you know that ..." spin, rather than implying that there's anything shady about Bitly.

This is absolutely useful information, and thanks for sharing.

That said, calling the model "shady" or "not cool", etc. isn't really defused by the writer's repeated mea culpas.

I'm curious. To people who have purchased bitly, why? I feel like setting it up would take as long as writing your own. My very first web project I ever did was to write a url shortener and it took me less than an afternoon. A good engineer I'm sure could do it in less than an hour.

For the price, what does it get you?

You could write your own exporter pretty trivially, using their API or resolving the URLs.

It would take a few hours of coding to throw together a url shortening service just for your needs, and since no one else be using it the amount of coding is trivial!

I guess a few other businesses will be approached by them same way.

Running your own shorter sounds like a must these days.

This is 100% your fault.

adf.ly has always seemed more shady to me than bit.ly.

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