I tried Bitly's free tier for 6 months and here's what actually happened

I sent the same link to three Slack channels last Tuesday and realized I had zero way of knowing which one drove the 47 signups I saw that morning. This was for a side project I've been working on, and I was using Bitly's free tier to shorten the links. I was mass-DMing people a link that might've been broken for three days, and I had no idea - which, honestly, was pretty embarrassing. Why I Needed Better Link Tracking I was doing what most people do - just using a URL shortener without really tracking the performance of the links. I'd use curl to test the links, but that only told me if they were working or not. I wasn't getting any insights into who was clicking, where they were coming from, or what devices they were using. I tried using some Python scripts with the requests library to scrape some data, but it was a lot of work and didn't give me the information I really needed. For example, I'd use something like requests.get('https://bit.ly/mylink') to test the link, but that didn'