The Promise We Cannot Take Back

On the twenty-ninth of October, nineteen sixty-nine, the first message sent over the ARPANET broke partway through. They were trying to send the word LOGIN. It got as far as L, and O.

Fifty-seven years later, links are still breaking after launch. That is the date we picked, and this is the promise we attached to it.

---

The problem the promise exists for takes two sentences. A static QR code has your destination baked into the pattern, so it scans with no company in the middle, and it cannot be edited afterward. A dynamic one can be re-pointed after printing because it holds a redirect, and every scan travels through whoever is hosting that redirect.

The editability is useful. The dependency is real. And a dead redirect does not announce itself on the carton. Somebody finds out by scanning it, and then you have packaging to relabel.

So we wrote down five lines we will not cross, put a date on them, and published them somewhere you can hold us to.

One. Your codes and links do not deactivate for non-payment. Core is paid once, so there is no renewal date to miss. Published short links and QR codes keep resolving even if you buy nothing else from us. We will not use a redirect as a collection notice.

Two. No ads and no interstitials, on any tier, free included. A scan goes to the destination you chose and nowhere else, and we will not change that bargain after you print.

Three. No scan caps and no click meters. We count clicks and scans for your analytics, not toward a shutdown threshold. A campaign will not stop quietly because it worked too well.

Four. No retroactive changes to links already out in the world. Your own edits are yours to make. Product changes are ours to manage, and we will not rewrite the behaviour of a link you published behind your back.

Five. Your data leaves whenever you want it to. Export every link and code with its destination, any time, from the dashboard. Being easy to leave is the only honest way to make a promise about permanence. A lock-in you have to trust is not a promise. It is a hope.

Two things I want to be straight about, because a pledge with a hole in it is worse than no pledge at all.

The optional Pro add-on is a subscription, and custom domains sit inside it. If Pro ends, every link and code already published on that domain keeps resolving. You cannot create new ones on it until Pro is active again. That is the honest shape of it, and it is written on the page in those words rather than hidden in a footnote.

And this is not a technical proof that nothing can go wrong. It is a statement of what we will and will not choose to do. Those are different things, and any company blurring them is selling you something.

Which brings me back to the twenty-ninth of October. We made it World Link Ownership Day, which is a large name for a small habit. Once a year, check who controls the routes your work depends on.

Three questions do most of it. Does the public route have a documented survival plan? Does the destination stay under your control after launch? Do your links and your data have a clean way out?

You do not need to run a server to own a link. You need to know who controls the route, whether it stays active, whether the destination can change, and whether your data can leave with you.

Ask those questions about us as well. That is what the page is for.

I am Ankur, and I built Whooshly, a campaign link toolkit you pay for once instead of by the month. Short links, QR codes, UTMs. If you want the code you printed to still work next year, we are at whooshly.co.