Meta's tiny browser is eating your fans.

It's the share of taps on your link that ended in the REAL native app, rather than stuck in an in-app browser or a broken hand-off. Worth knowing the nuance, because a good competitor gets half of this: Dub does measure app opens, via deferred deep linking and a mobile SDK — but only for an app YOU own and can ship their SDK inside. That's install attribution built for app developers measuring their own product. You cannot put an SDK inside Spotify, TikTok or Instagram, so that whole approach goes dark exactly where creators send their traffic. Zippy measures the other side: the interstitial that springs the app reports back from the device itself, so an iOS tap heading into an app you'll never own still resolves to opened, browser, or broken. Your dashboard, your A/B results, your webhooks and your share card all read that same signal. On Android the fate of the tap is not observable from the page, so it is recorded as unmeasured and scored in no rate — the app-open rate is an iOS rate.

Yes, on Hero and up — 2 to 4 weighted destinations on one short link. The difference is what you get back: not just which variant got more clicks, but the app-open rate per variant. A landing page can win the clicks and still lose on actually opening the app, which is exactly the case a click-scored A/B test cannot detect. Ending a test never kills the link — it falls back to your default destination.

Never. Not on Free, not after a trial, not if you cancel. Once a Zippy link is out in the world, it keeps redirecting — forever. A link that dies in public is the one thing a shortener must never do, so we built the whole system around never doing it.

They keep working, permanently. If you drop below the plan you made them on, older links past your new limit go "read-only" — they still redirect and keep their custom slug, you just can't edit them or see their analytics until you upgrade again. Nothing breaks for the people clicking.

Unlimited links and unlimited clicks. We don't meter your traffic or charge you more when a link goes viral. Success shouldn't come with a bigger bill.

LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit, Product Hunt, YouTube, TikTok, and X — with more added as we go. Zippy detects the platform and springs the real app instead of the crippled in-app webview.

Nope. Signup starts a 14-day Hero trial with zero card required. When it ends you slide down to Free automatically — no lockout, no surprise charge, and every link you made stays live.

On Legend, yes — one custom domain so your short links wear your brand. Hero and Sidekick use zipthe.link.

Yes. Five active links, real app-opening, forever, no card. It's a genuine tier, not a countdown in disguise.

You're right, and we're not going to claim a revenue multiple. Nobody in this category can honestly attribute a revenue lift to deep linking alone, us included. What we can give you is a measurable, comparable rate: what share of taps on this link reached the real app, next to another variant of the same link measured the same way. That's a controlled comparison you run on your own traffic, not a testimonial. Start with the free Deep Link Debugger and the free plan — we'd rather you prove it than believe it.

It will make your pixel look worse, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. A visitor who reaches the real app has left the surface your pixel can see — that is what escaping the webview does, by definition, for every tool that does it. Zippy fires your pixels on the click before the redirect, so the tap is still recorded. What you lose is the downstream in-app behaviour, because it's happening somewhere Meta can't watch. One creator hit exactly this: Ads Manager reported zero conversions while her real playlist followers climbed, and she trusted the real one. Our honest position: if pixel-measurable conversions matter to you more than the app opening, don't buy Zippy.

For Amazon specifically that's a fair point, and Amazon does give you its own numbers. Zippy's free plan opens the real app too, so if routing is all you need, take the free one — ours or theirs. The difference shows up when the destination isn't Amazon. Spotify, TikTok, Instagram and your own store don't hand you an arrival number, and that's where the measurement, the per-variant A/B scoring and the webhooks matter. Plus one thing no free tool promises: your Zippy links keep redirecting forever, even if you never pay us and even if you stop.

Patch it. Seriously — if a CSS fix makes your store render inside the webview, that's the right move and it costs you nothing. But notice what happened to the merchant who tried it: the patch fixed Meta and not TikTok, and weeks later someone else turned up in the same thread asking whether TikTok was still broken. It isn't one bug, it's a class of them, one per platform, each changing when the platform ships an update. Two things you can't patch your way to. You can't patch a hand-off into an app you don't own — no CSS makes a tap open the real Spotify or Amazon app from inside Instagram. And you can't patch a number you don't have: your theme fix has no way to tell you what share of taps reached the app, this week versus last, per platform. The rendering bug is genuinely yours to fix; those two aren't.

Zippy's links open the real app on Android the same way they do on iOS. What Android does NOT get is measurement: on Android we measure nothing, and every app-open rate on your dashboard is an iOS rate. Chrome fires the identical browser signal whether the app launched or the hand-off failed, so our interstitial registers no Android outcome at all — Android taps are counted separately and labelled unmeasured, in neither the top nor the bottom of any percentage. This is not a calibration gap we're closing; any Android number would be a guess dressed as data. Your click totals do split by OS, but your app-open rate cannot: the outcome data has no OS column. If your audience is Android-heavy, most of your traffic will have no app-open figure at all — decide whether that's worth it before you pay us.

Paste a Bitly, Short.io or Dub CSV export and Zippy bulk-zips the lot, with a dry-run preview before a single link is created. Free on every plan, including the free one. On Hero we'll also do it for you — send us the export and we ZIP every link by hand.

That's the four-step report: how many commented, how many DMs went out, how many tapped the link, and how many ended up in the real native app. Steps one and two are exact counts; steps three and four are sampled and labelled sampled. The fourth step is an iPhone figure — on Android the outcome of a tap cannot be observed from the page, so those taps are recorded as unmeasured and sit in neither the top nor the bottom of the rate. The gap between step three and step four is shown too: the people who tapped and got stranded in Instagram's in-app browser. One thing to be straight about — our Meta app is unapproved and Zippy's own DM automations are dark, so nobody can connect an Instagram account today. If you want the app-open measurement right now, paste a Zippy link into the comment-to-DM tool you already use; the measurement belongs to the link, not to whoever sent it.

No, and that's a deliberate refusal rather than a missing feature. Requiring someone to follow, like or share to unlock content is named as spam in Instagram's Community Standards. Some DM tools ship the switch anyway; if that gets actioned, it gets actioned on your account, not on ours, and we can't give your account back to you. So Zippy builds follow-awareness instead: a rule can read whether the person is already a follower and change its wording — warmer for a regular, a friendly invitation for someone new — while the link you promised goes out either way. Follower status comes from Instagram's own API on the permissions we already hold, and we don't promise it's real-time, so a rule degrades to its normal message rather than guessing.

Founding seats go in small batches — the current batch locks Hero at $99/year for 2 full years. Each batch that sells out, the next one costs more. One ask: tell us how it went after 30 days. When the founding seats are gone, they're gone.