By country · North America
Best URL shortener in United States
Short links for United States: a gc.mw link is 10 characters, .us sets a different floor, and 70 characters is what one Spanish message holds.
- ISO code
- US
- ccTLD
- .us
- Calling code
- +1
- Currency
- USD
- Standard offset
- UTC-05:00
- One message
- 70 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.
US dollar
The UTC day turns over at 19:00 local.
Spanish sends as UCS-2.
Six standard offsets across the fifty states. A campaign that goes out at 9am on the east coast is landing at 6am on the west, and the UTC day rolls over at 7pm Eastern, so a late-evening spike is filed under tomorrow.
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 .us costs you in characters
United States runs .us. Names register directly under .us, which is 3 characters. A one-letter .us 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.
What a message holds in United States
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 |
| Spanish | UCS-2 | 70 | 60 | outside the GSM alphabet: the acute vowels á í ó ú |
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, canción. 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. United States is at UTC-05:00, so the UTC day turns over at 19:00 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. United States spans 6 standard offsets. The one above is the main population centre.
Country itself is read at the edge and stored as the ISO code, so United States appears in your breakdown as US. 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 United States
United States maps to the USD price book, the default one, charged through razorpay-international. Local currency here is the US dollar, 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 +1
A digital business card stores its phone number in international form, so a United States number is written +1 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/1. Type a local number beginning with a zero, set 1 as the country code, and the leading zero is stripped for you.
More about United States
The evening that belongs to tomorrow
Rollups are keyed to the UTC day. At UTC-05:00 that boundary lands at 19:00 on the east coast, which is squarely inside the window when consumer traffic peaks. A newsletter that goes out after dinner has its clicks split across two rows in the daily chart, and the split moves by an hour when daylight time changes.
The fix is not a setting. It is reading the daily numbers as UTC days on purpose and comparing like with like, or reading the hourly breakdown, which is also UTC and at least does not hide the seam.
One country column, six clocks
Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska and Hawaii sit inside a single US row in any country breakdown. A national daily total therefore smears a five hour spread of local behaviour into one number. If send-time is the thing you are testing, split the campaign by list and use a different link per region so the report can tell them apart.
.us is not where anyone looks
The American habit is .com, not the ccTLD. That is worth stating because it changes the branded-link maths: the domain most American businesses already own is a .com, often a long one, and putting short links on a long .com makes them longer. Recognition is the reason to do it anyway, and it is a good reason. Brevity is not.
Spanish in the second column
Spanish is the second language of American SMS marketing and it does not fit the GSM 7-bit alphabet, because the acute vowels are missing from it. An English message holds 160 characters and its Spanish translation holds 70. Anyone sending both is budgeting for the shorter one.
Questions people ask about short links in United States
What is the shortest URL shortener available in United States?
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 United States?
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 United States.
How many characters does a link cost in a local-language Spanish SMS?
A Spanish 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 United States?
USD. United States uses the default price book, so paid plans are charged in USD through razorpay-international. The local currency here is the US dollar, and your bank does the conversion at its own rate.
How do I send United States traffic to a different page?
Add a geo rule with the country code US. The redirect layer reads the country from the edge, matches it against the rule and records the click with the variant geo:US, so you can see how much of the traffic the rule caught. Geo rules are a Business and Team feature.
Other countries in North America
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.