Bitly Omdömen 

They had an ad on their link which was very deceptive and makes you click OPEN and you assume yoyu are joining a webinar and they trick you into signing up for subscription and starts charging you $39.99 every month if you fail to notice. The advertisor was fitlead.com

I purchased a 12 Month plan on 6/24/2026 for $209.63. As of today, 10/28, I no longer have access to my account. I can't login with the login that has not changed since creating the account. I can't speak to customer service because there is none. All they have is a chat bot, which can't help you unless you login first.

To be clear, I would log in, check my scan data, and close the website. Now I can no longer access the service I paid for, nor can I ensure that the charge, which is reoccurring can be removed and stopped before next year.

Any company who doesn't have a direct way to contact them when issues arrive should not be a company at all. I will do everything in my power to make sure others do not use this site. You've been warned.

Bitly has recently implemented a hostile intermediate "preview/ad screen" on free accounts that forces anyone clicking your link to pass through an ad wall before reaching your site. I discovered this after already printing and distributing a QR code for a non-profit charity fundraiser. It panicked our donors and made our link look unsafe. Because the code was already distributed, I was cornered into paying $35 out of pocket for a monthly tier just to remove the ad screen. They explicitly hide their $10 plan behind an annual-only commitment to force desperate users into the higher tier. This is predatory, untrustworthy behavior. Avoid this platform and use TinyURL or Short.io instead.

scum! charged me fraudulently and refused to refund, no one to talk to, SCAM business!

Edit;
A useless reply from Bitly; Go to the "Help Centre" where you can read articles or talk to an AI bot which refuses to do anything. Absolutely no "team" to speak with, and no way to get anything resembling a resolution.

Absolutely abysmal customer service - and the cheek to reply to this review with the veneer of help, but no actual help?! Disgusting.

Bitly is no longer a utility; it’s an aggressive extortion racket.

Instead of a clean, instant 301/302 redirect, Bitly hijacks your traffic with an artificial 10-second countdown screen and ad gate. The moment a client scans your link, Bitly destroys their trust and makes your business look like a phishing scam.

The predatory part? They intentionally hold physical assets hostage. If you etched a Bitly QR code into metal, printed merchandise, or manufactured packaging, they know you can’t change the URL. To remove their sabotage screen, they lock the entry-level tier behind a forced annual-only lump sum and make monthly billing an insulting markup.

They took core web infrastructure and turned it into ransomware. Never touch Bitly for physical, permanent, or professional branding.

This company has no concern for customer experience. They will renew automatically. You do not get a reminder. There is no cooling off period. To stop this company taking further payments for a service I don't use, I have cancelled my credit card! I signed up for a free one off use a year ago, forgetting I'd even used it. Little did I know they renew, without telling you, on a paid subscription, this buried deep in their Ts & Cs. No refund given. They don't give an SH1T frankly.

The worse company in support, you cant reach anyone, AI will reply with repeated templates, no human at all to help you, no proper email, no phones .. nothing, i am struggling with them for 3 weeks now with no solution,
no reply at all, i sent copy to every email address i have in this company (i am old customer since 2020), today i get second AI reply that we are too busy and you can chat with our chatbot ... are you serious !!

I made a redirect using their service, i checked it and it was working fine. I was running ads to that link and the next morning I realized that there are 0 clicks. Basically I lost around $300 on ads and they had marked my link as spam (there is totally no violation) and my traffic was going on a dead link. I made a ticket to appeal for this, and their support hasn't replied to me in 2 weeks! Imagine paying $40 monthly for a shorting links service and not getting any support in half month, this is absurd.

Went through the whole process of creating an account, setting up the app then created a short URL. Short URL worked inside the app, but didn't work after posting it publicly. Very embarrassing!

STAY AWAY - SCAM!

⭐ À éviter

Un lien raccourci est censé rediriger vers l’URL demandée. Ici, au lieu d’une redirection directe, Bitly impose sa propre page intermédiaire avec son logo, son message et un délai avant d’accéder au site.

On crée un lien court pour simplifier l’accès à une page, pas pour servir de support publicitaire à Bitly entre le visiteur et notre site.

Très mauvaise pratique. Je n’utiliserai plus ce service.

First Port Development manager, Barbie Jackson.
Birnbeck Court, Weston-super-Mare BS23 1ul
Would like to say how grateful we are in her managing our development.
Many thanks Barbie
Peter & Teresa Butcher

Kann von dem Anbieter nur abraten.
Kundendienst ist quasi nicht vorhanden. Man erreicht nie irgendjemanden und bekommt auch keine Antwort.

It was a great service, but not anymore. Their free URL shortener was great, but they changed their policy after a while, and if I open my short URL, then it doesn't open the original URL directly, but it shows a crappy bitly page first, where I have to click on the actual, original link again, which massively confuses the users. It's only for the free users, I guess. But it's outrageous because we used to use these short links on QR codes, and we cannot change them. Shame on this company and its service. We will never use it again.

when I made my QR code (and printed it on my wedding invitations) I was not aware that I needed to sign up for a subscription to continue to keep my QR code active. Advanced subscription is only paid for annually, no monthly option. starter subscription is misleading as well. do not use this annoying and useless website, they are misleading and they scam you

Offering free subscriptions and then chare your creditcard. Is not nice

Someone from Bitly called me and gave me instructions to solve the login problem that I have with Bitly. However, now it's not working again.

If there are clear instructions to offer me, I strongly urge Bitly to send them to me IN PRINTED FORM so that I can keep them saved. I saved the Bitly login information, only for it to fail now. Written instructions are always valued, especially for someone like me who saves them on my hard drive, in my external storage device, and in my cloud storage. That way, the instructions can outlive me!
××××××××××××××××××××××××××××
I may be ultra-sensitive, but anyone who knows my life history would not be surprised. When I went back to Bitly and was once again told to log in and once again saw I was being rejected, say what you will, but rejecting me after I had enjoyed a login without problems made me wonder what was the truth?

There's some value in consistency. If every time I log in and it turns out to be just another gamble, that's not so easy for me to ignore. Bitly had solved the problem before, so was my ex-wife running the show now? I value consistency and reliability; when I see that every login attempt is a gamble, that is not something I can accept. If that is difficult to understand, maybe I need to look for a more reliable provider.

It is great to create a short link, test it successfully yourself, and then after sending a payable SMS campaign realize that it does not open directly for customers. Instead, it first takes them to Bitly’s own very suspicious-looking page. This is extremely damaging in a customer-facing campaign. F.CK!!

I was automatically and accidentally charged for a subscription renewal that I do not need. I cancelled it immediately and haven't used a single premium feature. I reached out to customer support, but they just copy-pasted their strict "no-refunds" policy, completely ignoring my situation. It feels like a total cash grab. Refusing a standard courtesy refund for an accidental charge is unacceptable for a company of this size My support ticket number is 2483399

Their QR code generating website is misleading. Pretends to be free: then deactivates your codes 7 days later and asks for a subscription to keep them open. Making QR codes is free - so they're just ruipping people off with their BS. Waste of time, waste of paper (since I've now printed the QR codes). Very angry.

I have one year in digital marketing experience and I tried this site for a few months and honestly I don't recommend it. It's not flexible and is clearly about money first. Access to basic information such as the analytics of your link are behind a paywall, making the service Bit.ly offers a little impractical for first time users