EthioLink Account Types Explained: Free, Starter, Business and Enterprise

Most people arrive at EthioLink with a single link to shorten. A few months later the same account is running a campaign, feeding a point-of-sale system, printing QR codes on packaging and answering a question from a finance officer about where last quarter's traffic came from. The account types exist so you can start at the first stage without paying for the last one.

There are exactly four: Free, Starter, Business and Enterprise. They are the same product — the same Amharic and Latin code engine, the same QR generator, the same click pipeline — with different limits and different features unlocked. There is also a fifth way to use EthioLink: no account at all, straight from the homepage. This guide covers all five, in the order most people meet them.

The four account types at a glance

Prices are monthly, in Ethiopian birr, and paid plans are activated after you request them from the billing page and an administrator approves the request, so nobody is charged midway through signing up by accident. A plan is not a different app either: everything you build on one stage keeps working on the next. Institutions usually move to Enterprise for reasons that are not in the price table at all — team roles, a branded host, signed webhooks and the data-handling answers in our local compliance hub.

No account: shorten a link right now

The homepage form works signed out. Paste a long address, optionally type a code in Ge'ez or Latin letters, and you get a short link plus its QR code. No email, no password, and no cap on how many you create.

The trade-off is ownership, and it is worth understanding before you rely on it. A link created that way belongs to nobody: it will not appear in your dashboard, its destination cannot be edited later, and there is no per-link analytics page behind it. It also joins the shared anonymous pool that the homepage lists publicly — so a link meant for one specific person, or one that points at something private, belongs in an account instead.

It is genuinely the right tool for a throwaway: the Wi-Fi password on a café table, a QR code taped to a shop window, a link you will replace next week. The moment a link has a campaign name, an audience, or a destination that might move, an account costs you less than losing it.

Free: 50 links and the full Ge'ez experience

Free is a real account, not a trial that quietly expires. It gives you up to 50 active short links — your dashboard shows the counter, so you can see it moving — with Ge'ez and Latin codes, custom aliases, click totals per link, the daily chart, and QR codes with size, logo and download options. Links you create while signed in are yours: their destination can be edited at any time, and changing where a link points never invalidates the QR code you already printed.

Free also includes a creator page — the link-in-bio page that lives behind one short URL — with up to five links on it, the default theme, and basic page analytics. Creator-page links draw from their own pool, so they never consume the 50.

What Free keeps back is the machinery a business grows into: API keys, email digests, CSV export, the advanced analytics breakdown (referrers, devices, unique visitors, geography) and a branded host with your own name on the link. Those are next, in roughly the order you will want them.

Choose Free if you are trying EthioLink out, or if your volume honestly is a poster, a bio and a handful of campaign links each month. Nothing about it is time-limited.

Starter (199 ETB): unlimited links, exports and digests

Starter removes the ceiling that Free puts on your link count and adds the two features that make a publishing rhythm bearable:

• Unlimited short links. Campaign after campaign, without tidying up old ones to make room.
• Automated email digests of click activity, so a week of results arrives in your inbox whether or not anyone opens the dashboard.
• CSV export of your links, so the numbers can go into the spreadsheet your reporting already uses.
• A 10-link creator page, still drawing from its own pool.

Analytics stays at the overview level on Starter: totals, per-link counts and the trend line across days. If the question is how many rather than who, where and on what, that is genuinely enough — and it is the honest reason most small businesses never leave this tier.

Starter suits a small business, a shop with a monthly catalogue, a single creator publishing weekly, a school, a church, or a clinic that sends a lot of links but does not need API access or a shared team.

Business (499 ETB): analytics, API keys and your own host

Business is where EthioLink stops being a shortener with numbers attached and starts being measurement infrastructure:

• Advanced analytics — referrers, countries resolved from the visitor's IP address, device, browser and operating system, unique and returning visitors, busiest hours, and journeys that follow a person across several of your links.
• Shareable reports you can print or send as a link, carrying your own branding instead of a generic template.
• Five API keys at 60 requests per minute each, so an order confirmation, a CMS or an SMS campaign can create links without a human in the loop. The developer walkthrough shows the full flow, including the QR endpoints.
• A branded host — your links publish on <yourname>.short.et instead of short.et. One host on Business.
• Every creator-page theme, plus social icons and a contact button on the page.

What a branded host changes

A branded host is not decoration; it changes which addresses exist. When an organisation has its own host, links created by its members resolve only on that host. The address you hand out is ethiopost.short.et/track, and the same code on the shared root — short.et/track — is deliberately a 404. That isolation is the point: another tenant's link can never be reached by guessing a code on the root domain, and a root-level code can never shadow yours.

This is why the dashboard, the copy button, the share menu and the QR code all show the branded address for institution links, and the root address only for personal links or institutions that have not been given a host yet. If your QR code encodes short.et/… while your campaign prints yourname.short.et/…, you are handing out two different links and only one of them is yours. The rule the product follows is simple and worth repeating: the address you copy is the address that resolves.

Business is the right tier for an SME with a marketing calendar, an agency running campaigns for clients, and institutions whose links need a recognisable, ownable prefix on every poster and every SMS.

Enterprise (1,499 ETB): teams, webhooks and white-label

Enterprise is the tier for an institution rather than an individual — a bank, a university, a ministry, a telecom, a large NGO, or a company where more than one department publishes links. On top of everything in Business:

• Team workspaces with roles. An owner, administrators and members share one workspace, one set of links and one billing relationship, without sharing a password. Members only see what belongs to the workspace they were invited into.
• 25 API keys at 300 requests per minute each, sized for an internal system that creates links in bulk.
• Click webhooks. Every click is POSTed to your own endpoint, signed with HMAC-SHA256, so your systems can verify the payload really came from EthioLink without polling anything.
• White-label QR logos — your mark inside the code instead of the EthioLink one.
• SLA and uptime reporting, so the question "was the service up when our SMS went out?" has a documented answer.
• Up to five branded hosts, which is how a group with several brands or departments keeps each one's links separate.

One detail worth knowing before you upgrade for a team: your personal links and an institution's links are separate resources. Personal links stay on your own account and keep the root short link. Institution links belong to the organisation, follow its branded host, and their analytics roll up to the workspace — not to whoever happened to be signed in when the link was created.

Which account type do you need?

Skip the adjectives and answer four questions:

1. Am I shortening one thing, once, and never thinking about it again? Use the homepage with no account.
2. Do I want links I can find, edit and count, at poster scale? Free is enough, up to 50.
3. Am I publishing continuously, and do I need exports or a digest? Move to Starter.
4. Do I report on results, need systems to create links, or want my own name on the prefix? That is Business — and if several people, automated click flows or uptime evidence are involved, Enterprise.

If you are unsure between two tiers, start at the lower one. Upgrading later takes a request and an approval; nothing you created is lost in the move, which is the next section.

Changing plans, and what happens to your links

Plan changes are requested from the billing page inside your account; a paid plan becomes active once an administrator approves the request, which is also when payment is arranged. Three things stay stable across every move:

• Your links are never deleted by a plan change. A lower limit only prevents creating more once you are at it; the links you already published keep redirecting and keep counting clicks.
• Your codes do not change. A link you printed in a campaign does not get a new code because your plan moved, and codes remain globally unique — including across tenants on different branded hosts.
• Institution links stay with the institution. They belong to the workspace, not the member who created them, so they survive a change of staff.

If a change would affect something you have already put in print — a branded host, for instance — the billing page and the administrator will tell you before it takes effect rather than after. A branded host slug itself can only be changed once every 30 days, so a link you handed out yesterday cannot be moved twice in a week.

Questions we get asked

Is there really no card required?

Correct. Free requires an email address and a password, nothing else, and it does not expire. Anonymous use requires nothing at all. Paid plans are requested, then approved — so signing up can never produce a surprise charge.

Can I put links on my own domain?

Branding arrives as a name under short.et: <yourname>.short.et, one host on Business and up to five on Enterprise. A completely separate top-level domain is not part of the product today, and we would rather say that plainly than sell a feature that does not exist.

What happens to my links if I stop paying?

Nothing is deleted by the change itself, and existing links keep redirecting. What a lower plan takes away is capacity and features: you cannot create links past the cap, and the deeper analytics, API keys or digests are no longer available. If a branded host is involved, ask before you downgrade — your links may already be printed somewhere.

Do anonymous links count against anything?

No. Anonymous links sit in a separate public pool: they are unlimited, they are not part of any account's allowance, and no plan limit applies to them. That is also exactly why they should not be used for anything private.

Can I be on Free personally and in an institution at once?

Yes, and it is a common setup. One login can hold personal links on the root short link and belong to one or more workspaces whose links follow the institution's branded host. Your dashboard shows both, and analytics are separated so an institution's traffic never lands in your personal charts.

Start where you are, move up when you feel it

The honest summary: nobody needs Business in their first week. Start with the account that matches today's work — nothing at all, or Free — and upgrade when a specific thing starts hurting: you have hit 50 links, you want last month's numbers exported, you need a system to create links, or your posters should carry your own name rather than ours.

Every stage is priced in birr, activated with an approval rather than an automatic charge, and shares the features that matter most here: codes in the alphabet you think in, QR codes that survive a change of destination, and click data that stays about the click rather than the person.