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.

Xshort

A url shortener that simply works

A url shortener that simply works