About PicKu

PicKu is a URL shortening service built for people who share links professionally but don't want to pay enterprise prices or fight enterprise software to do it. Paste a long URL, get a short one in a couple of seconds, see exactly who clicked it, from where, on what. Free to start, no credit card, no trial countdown.

Why we built PicKu

The idea came from a familiar frustration. Link shorteners used to be simple utilities — paste, shorten, done. Over the years, the big platforms kept moving features behind sales calls and annual contracts, while free tiers kept shrinking: fewer links, analytics locked after seven days, QR codes paywalled. Meanwhile, the people who actually rely on short links — freelance marketers, small online shops, course creators, community managers — don't have procurement departments. They have a link that needs to work tonight.

So in early 2026 we set out to build the version we wanted to use: a shortener where the free tier is genuinely usable, not a marketing trap. Ten links with full analytics, every QR code included, custom aliases from day one. If you outgrow that — unlimited links, custom domains, splash pages, tracking pixels — VIP costs less than a coffee a week.

What we believe

• Free should mean useful. A free plan that can't tell you which country clicks came from is a demo, not a product. Ours shows the full picture.
• Your data is yours. Click analytics are visible to the account owner and nobody else. We don't sell data, and we aggregate and anonymize anything we publish as industry research.
• No lock-in. Links stay editable. Redirects are fast (most under 50 milliseconds) because a short link that slowly tiptoes to its destination loses clicks on every hop.
• Speed is a feature. We obsess over redirect latency the way other tools obsess over dashboards.

What's inside today

PicKu ships a full toolkit around the humble short link: custom aliases, QR codes generated automatically for every link, password protection, link expiration dates, geotargeting and device targeting, bulk shortening, link bundles, splash pages, overlay pages, event tracking pixels, public profiles, and custom domain support on VIP. Everything works on mobile as well as it does on desktop.

Who uses PicKu

Three groups keep showing up. Freelance marketers and agencies run client campaigns and need per-link reporting they can screenshot into a report. Small online shops put short links with QR codes on packaging, receipts, and flyers. Creators — newsletter writers, course builders, streamers — use bio links and track what their audience actually clicks. What they have in common: they judge tools by whether the free tier lets them do real work, and whether the data is honest.

How we handle trust and safety

Short links have a spam problem, and we take it seriously. Every PicKu link uses the picku.org domain, we maintain blocklists for malicious destinations, and we suspend accounts that abuse the service. For legitimate users this matters in a practical way: a link domain with a clean reputation keeps your emails out of spam folders and your clicks flowing. We also publish what we learn — our click-behavior research is aggregated and anonymized, never sold.

Our pricing philosophy

We keep one paid plan and one free plan, and we publish exactly what each includes — no feature matrix scattered across four tiers, no "contact sales" gate in front of basic analytics. The free plan exists because a shortener with no links and no data is not a product demo; it is a wall. If PicKu does the job for you at ten links, we would rather you stay and tell other people than force an upgrade. When your volume grows, VIP is priced so that a solo freelancer can expense it without thinking — and every VIP feature (custom domains, splash pages, tracking pixels, unlimited links) is documented publicly on the pricing page before you pay.

Support the way it should be

Questions get answered by the people who build the service, usually within a day. There is no ticket queue theater: email us from the contact page and a human reads it. Bug reports and feature requests go into the same list, and the changelog on our blog shows what shipped and when. If something breaks, we say so — status notes go up on the blog, and fixes take priority over new features.

Where we're headed

We ship improvements continuously — deeper analytics views, better team workflows, and more integrations are all in active development. If something you need is missing, we genuinely want to hear about it: most of what exists today started as a user email. Reach us any time through the contact page or on our blog, where we publish what we learn from running the service — including our ongoing click-behavior research.

— The PicKu Team