How it works
Long, ugly, full of UTM parameters. It goes through six validation rules before anything is written.
The pipeline above is not a mock. Those are the layers your request actually passes through, in the order it passes them.
Each visit is recorded after the redirect has already answered — so the person clicking never waits on our analytics.
Built-in assistant
Trunc ships a chat that is a genuine MCP client — the same protocol, the same server, the same tools Claude Desktop would use. Ask it to shorten something, or how your links did this week.
And it doesn't hide the tool calls. You see exactly what it asked for and exactly what came back — because an assistant you can't check is an assistant you can't trust.
Example
Shorten github.com/subhm2004 and tell me which of my links is doing best
Done — it's at trunc.sh/x7Kp2mQ1. Your best performer is /neon-db with 51 clicks, about half of everything you've had this month.
Architecture
Most projects list design patterns like trophies. These are here because specific things were unsafe, slow, or impossible to change without them — and the code says which. Four of them are below; the rest are in the source, with the reasoning next to each one.
Every line of SQL lives behind an interface. No service imports a driver, and none of them knows Postgres is down there at all — which is why moving this app off MongoDB rewrote one directory instead of the whole codebase.
Changing how a short code is minted is one environment variable. A different algorithm, a different alphabet, a different length — and not one line of business logic moves. That is the test of whether a seam is real.
The redirect answers before the click is ever written down. Every visitor to every link used to sit and wait on our analytics, on the one code path where speed is the entire product. Now none of them do.
Every URL runs the same six rules before anything is stored. Every response leaves in the same envelope. Every call from the browser goes through one door. Consistency you don't have to remember to keep.
Free, no account needed to start. Sign up when you want to see where the clicks are coming from.
open source · MIT · self-hostable