By country · Asia
Best URL shortener in India
Short links for India: a gc.mw link is 10 characters, .in sets a different floor, and 70 characters is what one Hindi message holds.
- ISO code
- IN
- ccTLD
- .in
- Calling code
- +91
- Currency
- INR
- Standard offset
- UTC+05:30
- One message
- 70 chars
What geo rules and the country column match on.
Most names sit under .co.in.
What a card and a click-to-chat link carry.
Indian rupee
The UTC day turns over at 05:30 local.
Hindi sends as UCS-2.
India is the one country with its own price book in AppConfig. Every other country is billed from the USD book; India is billed in rupees through Razorpay, and the listed price is the price you pay because GST is treated as included.
How long a link is, counted
A gc.mw link is the host, a slash and a code. The host is five characters. A code is 5 characters on the free tier and 4 on a paid plan, drawn from a 58-character alphabet with no zero, capital O, capital I or lowercase L in it, so nobody has to guess which character they are reading. That makes a paid link 10 characters and a free one 11.
| Host | Service | Characters | With the slash | Registry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| t.ly | T.LY | 4 | 5 | .ly, Libya |
| v.gd | v.gd | 4 | 5 | .gd, Grenada |
| gc.mw | gc.mw | 5 | 6 | .mw, Malawi |
| is.gd | is.gd | 5 | 6 | .gd, Grenada |
| bit.ly | Bitly | 6 | 7 | .ly, Libya |
| cutt.ly | Cutt.ly | 7 | 8 | .ly, Libya |
| rebrand.ly | Rebrandly | 10 | 11 | .ly, Libya |
| tinyurl.com | TinyURL | 11 | 12 | .com |
Two hosts on that list are shorter than ours and one ties. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What decides the length of a real link is the code, and a four-character code on a five-character host beats a longer code on a shorter one.
What .in costs you in characters
India runs .in. Registrants normally sit under .co.in, which is 6 characters before a single letter of name is added. A one-letter .co.in domain is therefore 7 characters, against five for gc.mw. That is the floor, and it assumes a single-letter name that almost certainly is not available.
What a message holds in India
One SMS carries 140 octets. Text that fits the GSM 7-bit alphabet packs seven bits to a character and gets 160 of them. One character outside that alphabet switches the whole message to UCS-2 at sixteen bits a character, and the limit drops to 70. That single rule decides whether a link is a rounding error in your message or a fifth of it.
| Language | Encoding | One message | Left after a link | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hindi | UCS-2 | 70 | 60 | outside the GSM alphabet: the Devanagari script |
| English | GSM-7 | 160 | 150 | every letter it needs is in the GSM alphabet |
| Tamil | UCS-2 | 70 | 60 | outside the GSM alphabet: the Tamil script |
| Bengali | UCS-2 | 70 | 60 | outside the GSM alphabet: the Bengali script |
The verdict in that table is computed, not asserted. Each row runs a real word of the language through the GSM 03.38 table: हिन्दी, your short link, தமிழ், বাংলা. Beyond one message the text is split into parts of 153 or 67 characters, and every part is billed. A 10-character link against a 70-character ceiling is the difference between one part and two.
The day your clicks are filed under
Click rollups are keyed to the UTC day and the hour breakdown is UTC hours. India is at UTC+05:30, so the UTC day turns over at 05:30 local time. Anything clicked after that is filed under the next day in the daily chart even though it is still the same evening where you are. India keeps a single standard offset, so there is no internal split to reason about.
Country itself is read at the edge and stored as the ISO code, so India appears in your breakdown as IN. That is the same string a geo rule matches on, which is deliberate: the value you read in analytics is the value you type in a rule.
Paying from India
India has its own price book. Plans are charged in INR, the Indian rupee, through razorpay, so the number on the pricing page is the number on the statement. Nothing on the free tier depends on where you are. Anonymous links last 30 days and a free account keeps them for 365 days from any country.
A card and a chat link with +91
A digital business card stores its phone number in international form, so a India number is written +91 followed by the national number. The vCard file uses the same form, which is what makes a scanned card dial correctly from a phone bought anywhere else. The click-to-chat builder takes the same number and produces a link that starts wa.me/91. Type a local number beginning with a zero, set 91 as the country code, and the leading zero is stripped for you.
More about India
The only country with its own price book
Every other country on this list is billed from the USD book. India has its own, in rupees, charged through Razorpay, with tax treated as included in the listed number. That is a configuration fact rather than a marketing one: the country-to-book map in AppConfig has exactly one entry and a default.
It matters beyond the currency. A rupee price is a rupee price on the statement, with no conversion spread from a card network and no foreign transaction fee.
Two languages, two message limits
An English SMS holds 160 characters. The same message in Hindi holds 70, because Devanagari is nowhere in the GSM 7-bit alphabet and the whole message switches to UCS-2. Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati all behave the same way.
Most Indian campaigns run in both. The English version and the Hindi version therefore have different budgets for the same content, and the Hindi one is the constraint. A 10-character link against a 70-character ceiling is a seventh of the message; against 160 it is a rounding error. That gap is the practical case for the shortest link you can get.
Half an hour out
India runs on UTC+05:30, one offset for the whole country from Gujarat to Arunachal. Click rollups are keyed to the UTC day, so the analytics day turns over at 05:30 in the morning local, and hourly numbers are UTC hours that need a five and a half hour shift rather than a whole-hour one. Any tool that assumes whole-hour offsets will put an Indian evening in the wrong bucket.
.in and .co.in
India is one of the countries where the registry sells names directly under the ccTLD as well as under .co.in, so a domain can be as short as the name plus three characters. That is genuinely competitive with a five-character host, and if a short .in name is available it is worth taking.
Questions people ask about short links in India
What is the shortest URL shortener available in India?
gc.mw is five characters, which makes a paid link 10 characters end to end and a free one 11. Two well-known hosts are shorter than five: v.gd and t.ly are four each. The honest comparison is the whole link, host plus slash plus code, because a four-character host with an eight-character code is longer than a five-character host with a four-character code.
Is there a free URL shortener for India?
Yes. Shortening without an account works from anywhere and the link lasts 30 days. A free account raises that to 365 days and gives you click analytics. Neither step asks for a card, and there is no separate signup for India.
How many characters does a link cost in a local-language Hindi SMS?
A Hindi message uses UCS-2, so one message holds 70 characters. A 10-character gc.mw link leaves 60 for words. Once a message runs long it is split into parts of 67 characters and you pay per part.
Which currency am I billed in from India?
INR. India has its own price book, so paid plans are charged in the local currency, the Indian rupee, through razorpay.
How do I send India traffic to a different page?
Add a geo rule with the country code IN. The redirect layer reads the country from the edge, matches it against the rule and records the click with the variant geo:IN, so you can see how much of the traffic the rule caught. Geo rules are a Business and Team feature.
Other countries in Asia
The questions behind this page
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