Xshort

I just created a URL shortener, am I crazy? Sometimes we do things for fun, some other times we need something and we don’t exactly find what we need on the market. My url shortener came from both. I needed a simple tool to shorten my urls and generate SVG QR codes. I found a couple of alternatives and most of them were either complicated or expensive, so I decided to create one myself. You just have to shorten a URL, what can go wrong? As with all the IT projects I have been involved in the last 33 years, reality was much different from my expectations. Shortening a URL isn’t quite difficult, shortening a million is much harder that you may think. So I decided to dive deep into the subject and I came up with an infrastructure which was useful for me and eventually for other people. The front end is a simple Angular application while the back end is completely realized in Golang with REST api. After some digging I ended up using Postgres as a database. Everything is hosted on Digital Ocean servers and has been created to be scaled up as traffic grows. Happily ever after right? Not quite, because just while I was brushing up the last details of the product my accountant told me: “Do you really want to sell abroad?, Regulations are pretty complicated…” and that was the beginning of an infinite digging on international laws. Coming from the country of bureaucracy (Italy) I thought I had a thick skin on that, but it turns out EU and the US can be even more challenging. So eventually I think I have a clear vision of the aspects involved in global Saas application and I decided to finally open my website: https://xshort.app There is a free plan with a couple of URLs and just one paid plan with 1.000.000 URLs which should be enough for most clients that are in my target market. I am still ironing out some details about Stats and legal aspects but I would really like opinions on the result. So far everything is production ready except for the REST api to interact with the website which should be completed in a couple of weeks.

Hello, our API is finally ready! We are looking for beta testers to create some URLS and give us feedback. Anyone interested? The first 10 beta tester will receive a 3 year free subscription for the PRO version :)