About Kort
Kort makes really short links, and shares the shortest ones fairly.
What Kort is
Kort is a free URL shortener. Paste a long link and get a short one that opens the same page. A short link is quicker to type, easier to say out loud and fits on a poster, a slide or a screen.
Most links are 5 characters, picked at random for you, with no account. If you log in with Google, you can choose your own code, or borrow a shorter one for a while. The name Kort means “short” in Dutch and in the Scandinavian languages.
Why short codes are rare
Codes use 33 letters and numbers. We leave out o, i and l, because they look like 0 and 1. Each extra character makes 33 times more codes, so the numbers grow fast:
| Characters | Codes | Who gets them |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 33 | Waitlist only. Not open yet. |
| 2 | 1,089 | Free for 1 hour at a time |
| 3 | 35,937 | Free for up to 3 days |
| 4 | 1,185,921 | Free for 30 days at a time, up to 1 year in all |
| 5 | 39,135,393 | Picked at random for you. Free forever. |
| 6 to 20 | 1,291,467,969+ | You choose. Free forever. |
That is the ladder. The shorter the code, the fewer there are, so the shorter your turn. If one person kept a 2-character code for good, 1,088 other people could never have it. So we lend the shortest codes out, and when a turn ends, the code rests for a while before the next person can claim it. Longer codes are plentiful, so they are free for good.
One-character codes are the top rung. There are only 33, and we keep them closed for now. Join the waitlist to hear when they open.
Safe by design
Short links are easy to misuse, so we check new links against Google Web Risk, limit how fast anyone can make links, and run a bot check on every form. We switch off links that people report and that break our terms. See something wrong? Report a link. To see what we keep about you, read the privacy page.