By country · Africa
Best URL shortener in Malawi
Short links for Malawi: a gc.mw link is 10 characters, .mw sets a different floor, and 160 characters is what one English message holds.
- ISO code
- MW
- ccTLD
- .mw
- Calling code
- +265
- Currency
- MWK
- Standard offset
- UTC+02:00
- One message
- 160 chars
What geo rules and the country column match on.
Names register directly under it.
What a card and a click-to-chat link carry.
Malawian kwacha
The UTC day turns over at 02:00 local.
English sends as GSM-7.
gc.mw is a Malawian domain. The .mw registry is the reason this link is five characters instead of eleven, which makes Malawi the one country on this list with a direct claim on the product.
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 .mw costs you in characters
Malawi runs .mw. Names register directly under .mw, which is 3 characters. A one-letter .mw domain is 4 characters, against five for gc.mw. That is shorter than gc.mw, and if you can get one of those names it is a real option worth taking seriously.
.mw is also rented by the shortening industry itself: gc.mw sits on it. A ccTLD is a country asset that the rest of the world buys for the letters, which is exactly why gc.mw is a Malawian domain.
What a message holds in Malawi
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | GSM-7 | 160 | 150 | every letter it needs is in the GSM alphabet |
| Chichewa | GSM-7 | 160 | 150 | every letter it needs is in the GSM alphabet |
The verdict in that table is computed, not asserted. Each row runs a real word of the language through the GSM 03.38 table: your short link, Chichewa. 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 160-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. Malawi is at UTC+02:00, so the UTC day turns over at 02:00 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. Malawi 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 Malawi appears in your breakdown as MW. 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 Malawi
Malawi maps to the USD price book, the default one, charged through razorpay-international. Local currency here is the Malawian kwacha, and the conversion happens at your bank, not at ours. 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 +265
A digital business card stores its phone number in international form, so a Malawi number is written +265 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/265. Type a local number beginning with a zero, set 265 as the country code, and the leading zero is stripped for you.
More about Malawi
Where the five characters come from
The domain in every link on this site is Malawian. The .mw registry delegated it, and a two-letter name under a two-letter ccTLD is what makes a five-character host possible at all.
There is no trick behind it. Short names under the large registries are either reserved or priced in the tens of thousands, and small registries are where two-letter names are still obtainable. The same arithmetic put bit.ly, cutt.ly, t.ly and rebrand.ly in Libya, is.gd and v.gd in Grenada, and t.co in Colombia. Buying a country's letters is the oldest move in the shortener business.
Naming, and being straight about it
Registering a foreign ccTLD because the letters spell something is not a contribution to the country that runs it. It is a domain purchase. Malawi gets registry fees and nothing else, which is the honest description and the same one that applies to every other shortener on the list.
What we can say without stretching is that a .mw domain is subject to the .mw registry, and that the product is named for it rather than hiding it.
For Malawian users
Nothing about the free tier depends on where you are. Anonymous links last 30 days, a free account keeps them for a year, and paid plans are billed from the default USD price book. English is an official language here and fits the GSM 7-bit alphabet, so an SMS holds the full 160 characters, and Chichewa written in plain Latin letters does too.
Malawi keeps a single standard offset at UTC+02:00, so the analytics day turns over at two in the morning local, and the daily chart reads close to the local day.
Questions people ask about short links in Malawi
What is the shortest URL shortener available in Malawi?
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 Malawi?
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 Malawi.
How many characters does a link cost in a local-language English SMS?
A English message uses GSM-7, so one message holds 160 characters. A 10-character gc.mw link leaves 150 for words. Once a message runs long it is split into parts of 153 characters and you pay per part.
Which currency am I billed in from Malawi?
USD. Malawi uses the default price book, so paid plans are charged in USD through razorpay-international. The local currency here is the Malawian kwacha, and your bank does the conversion at its own rate.
How do I send Malawi traffic to a different page?
Add a geo rule with the country code MW. The redirect layer reads the country from the edge, matches it against the rule and records the click with the variant geo:MW, so you can see how much of the traffic the rule caught. Geo rules are a Business and Team feature.
Other countries in Africa
The questions behind this page
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Try it with your own link
Paste a long link and get a 10-character gc.mw link with a QR code. No account needed for 30 days; free forever with one.