Open Sourcing a URL Shortener: What We Learned
Why we made hrva.cc open source, what the community taught us, and the surprising number of people who want to self-host their link infrastructure.
hrva.cc is open source — the entire codebase is on GitHub under an MIT license. Here's why we did it, what we got out of it, and what surprised us about running an open source URL shortener.
Why Open Source?
The decision was practical, not ideological. URL shorteners are a commodity — there are hundreds of them. Making the code open source differentiates hrva.cc from closed competitors. It signals transparency (you can see exactly how your data is handled), trust (you can audit the security code), and longevity (if hrva.cc ever shuts down, the code doesn't disappear).
The Surprise: Self-Hosting Demand
The most unexpected outcome was the number of people who want to self-host. Companies with compliance requirements (GDPR, SOC2, internal data policies) prefer to run their own instance rather than trust a third-party service. Universities want to provide link shorteners for their students. Developers want to experiment with the architecture. The Docker image with multi-arch support (amd64 + arm64) was a direct response to this demand.
What Open Source Changed
Publishing the code improved the project in unexpected ways. Knowing that strangers will read the code made us write better code — cleaner interfaces, better documentation (in the form of clear naming and structure), and more thorough tests. The test suite grew significantly as we added coverage for edge cases we wouldn't have bothered with internally.
What We Didn't Expect
The hardest part of open source is not the code — it's the issue triage. Setting up issue templates, responding to questions, reviewing contributions, and deciding what to accept takes more time than writing the code itself. We learned to be clear about what we will and won't accept: bug fixes and small features yes, major architectural changes no (unless they align with the roadmap).
Would We Do It Again?
Absolutely. The open source version drives adoption that the hosted version alone wouldn't get. People find hrva.cc through GitHub, try the hosted version, and some become paying API users. The self-hosters would never have used a closed-source shortener anyway — they're not lost revenue, they're free marketing.