Show HN: Updog.link – a URL shortener you can run for free (whats.updog.link)

Hi HN. I half-built a dumb link-shortening service in 2020 on API Gateway and DynamoDB, and never finished it, but that didn't stop me from registering an 'updog'-themed domain for it. I forgot about it until tonight and decided it was worth finishing this tool from a bygone era.

I scrapped everything and moved to more modern tools: one script on a Cloudflare Worker, with the links (and the Terraform state) in R2. You can use what I'm hosting if you want, or clone it and deploy your own. Here are some of the characteristics:

It's free-ish. It runs on Cloudflare's free tier, which serves something like a hundred thousand requests a day. More than this will ever need.

It's stateless-ish. Each link is an immutable JSON object in R2. No database, no server, nothing running between requests.

It's private-ish. There are no click stats, so nobody can see who followed a link, including the person who made it. Cloudflare's edge presumably logs something somewhere, because that's what edges do.

It's funny-ish, if you can remember being 12.

What surprised me most is how simple a task this has become. Not only is writing code much faster, but the architecture and footprint are much smaller. I like to think I'm also better at my job, but that part is probably negligible.

The S3-ish object + short-lived compute architecture was sorta possible in 2020, but not that common as I recall. The simplicity is what let me rework and publish it from the couch in an evening.

You can make a shortlink with it here: https://whats.updog.link

Source (MIT): https://github.com/ignore-prior-instructions/Updog.link