The URL shortener is one of the internet's oldest conveniences, and one of its most neglected. The tools that survived tend to be either enterprise suites priced for procurement departments or free services with a quiet sideline in visitor data. in.bio, which opens to everyone today, is a bet that the category deserves better: links that are fast, numbers that are honest, and a free tier that is actually useful.
What you get
Paste a long URL and you get a short one, served from an in-memory cache in a few milliseconds. The more interesting machinery sits behind it.
Every link carries a QR code you can style, with dotted patterns, rounded markers, and custom colors, and every design is machine-verified to stay scannable. Because the code encodes the short link rather than the destination, you can change where it points long after it has been printed. A menu that moves no longer costs you a print run.
The analytics make one unusual promise: they exclude the machines. A remarkable share of clicks on any shared link comes from preview crawlers, email security scanners, and monitoring bots, and most tools happily count them as engagement. in.bio tallies bots separately and shows you both numbers. What remains, clicks by country, device, browser, and referrer, describes actual people.
On privacy, the position is simple. No raw IP address is ever stored. Unique visitors are estimated with a one-way hash whose key rotates daily, which makes recognizing a person across days impossible, for anyone, including us. Do Not Track is honored. The privacy policy is short because there is little to confess.
The free plan covers 50 links and 5,000 tracked clicks a month, custom slugs and QR codes included. Pro costs $9 a month, Business $29. One rule applies to all of them: existing links keep redirecting even after you hit a limit. A link, once shared, is infrastructure, and infrastructure should not go dark over billing.
No account required, and that includes the API
Two endpoints work without any signup at all. One request shortens a URL:
curl -X POST https://in.bio/api/shorten \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com"}'And a single URL is itself a styled QR code image: https://in.bio/api/qr?url=https://example.com&dot_style=dots. For anything more ambitious there are official SDKs in five languages, each with zero dependencies: inbio-sdk on npm, inbio on PyPI, RubyGems, and Packagist, and inbio-go for Go. The full reference lives at docs.in.bio.
Ready for the agents, too
Software is acquiring a new class of user, and in.bio was built expecting them. A hosted MCP server at mcp.in.bio/mcp, listed in the official MCP registry, lets Claude or any MCP client shorten links and generate QR codes with no key at all, and manage a full account with one. An OpenAPI spec, llms.txt, and agent-skills index round out the paperwork, for whatever reads manuals these days.
The best way to judge a link tool is to use it, and that takes about four seconds: paste something at in.bio. If you find a sharp edge, hello@in.bio reaches a human.