Hello from clkr.in
Hello! This is clkr.in, pronounced “clicker”. It’s a link shortener and link-analytics tool, built first for businesses in India.
You’ve probably used a shortener before. Paste in a long URL, get back a short one, see how many people tapped it. That still matters, and clkr.in does it. But over the past couple of years, sending a link to customers in India has become harder than it should be, and that’s the problem we want to solve.
Why another link shortener?
Since October 2024, every link in a commercial SMS has to be whitelisted by the sender on the telecom operators’ DLT platform. Messages with links that aren’t on the list get blocked. Generic shared shorteners don’t pass, because the link has to visibly belong to the business sending it.
For a lender sending EMI reminders, a logistics company sending delivery updates or a D2C brand running a sale, that means short links have to live on your own domain, follow a format the operators accept and point only where you said they would. Most shorteners weren’t designed with any of that in mind.
clkr.in is. We’re building it around three ideas:
- Your domain, not ours. Links on
go.yourbrand.intell customers who sent the message before they tap, and keep you off a domain shared with strangers. If you don’t have a domain yet, you can start on your own subdomain likeyourbrand.clkr.in. - Compliance built in, not bolted on. Link formats that carry your DLT header, destinations you verify once, an audit log of every change and a helper that prepares your whitelisting entries for each operator’s portal.
- Fast everywhere. Redirects are answered from Cloudflare’s edge network, close to whoever taps the link, so the short link never becomes the slow part of the journey.
What you’ll be able to do
The first version covers what most teams need every day:
- Create short links with a custom or auto-generated slug, and organise them with tags
- Download a QR code for any link
- See clicks over time, with breakdowns by location, device, browser and referrer
- Send different visitors to different places by device or country
- Build UTM-tagged links without hand-editing query strings
- Create links in bulk from a CSV or from your own systems through the API
Then comes the toolkit for SMS and WhatsApp senders: header-in-path links, verified destinations and DLT Assist to track your whitelisting status with Jio, Airtel, Vi and BSNL.
A few things we won’t compromise on
A short link is a promise: tap this and you’ll land somewhere safe. So a clkr.in link only ever goes to the destination its owner saved, never to an address taken from the request. Destinations are scanned for malware and phishing, and anyone can report a bad link.
We also don’t keep visitors’ raw IP addresses. Analytics should tell you how a campaign performed, not who tapped it.
What’s next
We’re building in the open, one milestone at a time, and we’ll write about it here: product updates, how the redirect path stays fast and practical guides to sending compliant links in India.
If you send links to customers by SMS, WhatsApp or email and any of this sounds familiar, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading, and welcome to clkr.in.