Dub Review 2026

Last updated: September 2026

What Dub Actually Is

Dub is a link attribution platform that combines branded short links, real time click and conversion analytics, and a full affiliate program manager in a single product. Its own tagline, "turn clicks into revenue," is an honest description of the intent. The tool is built less around vanity link shortening and more around following one click all the way through to a paying customer, which is a meaningfully different job than most shorteners take on.

It sits in the same broad category as Bitly and Rebrandly, but the emphasis is different. Dub started as an open source project and treats the short link as the first measurable step in a funnel rather than the finished product, then layers partner payouts and developer tooling on top. Companies including Twilio, Perplexity, Framer, Vercel, Clerk, and Cal.com use it, and the platform reports more than 100,000 customers processing hundreds of millions of links and events every month.

Conversion Tracking From Click to Sale

The feature that clearly separates Dub from a plain URL shortener is end to end conversion tracking. Most shorteners stop at the click. They tell you how many people tapped a link and roughly where they came from, and that is the end of the story. Dub continues past that point and ties each click to the downstream events that matter, such as a sign up, a qualified lead, or a completed purchase, so a link is credited with real revenue instead of raw traffic.

Setup runs through the analytics layer and the API. You install a tracking script or one of the SDKs, mark the conversion events you care about (a trial start, a subscription, an order value), and Dub connects them back to the originating link, referrer, and campaign. From there the dashboard reports customer lifetime value, retention, and funnel drop off directly next to the click data, so a channel can be judged on the sales it produced rather than the visits it generated. This same attribution is what powers the affiliate side, because a partner can only be paid a commission once a click has been proven to convert.

In practice this shifts the conversation inside a team. Instead of arguing about which channel drove the most clicks, you can point to which link drove the most paying customers and at what lifetime value. That is the difference between a shortener that is a convenience and an attribution tool that informs budget. It does require the tracking to be installed correctly, so the richest data goes to teams willing to do a small amount of setup up front.

What Else It Does

Dub Links

The core link engine supports branded short links on your own custom domains, built in QR codes with custom colors and a logo, device and geo targeting, A/B testing of destinations, deep links into mobile apps, link cloaking, password protection, expiration dates, custom link previews, and a UTM builder. Links are organized into folders with role based access control, which starts to matter as soon as more than one or two people share an account. There is also a free dub.link domain for teams that do not want to configure their own, which lowers the barrier to a first branded link.

Dub Partners

Partners is a complete affiliate and referral program manager. You define commission structures, including different rewards by partner, product, or country, give each partner an embedded dashboard to track their own performance, and run global payouts with tax compliance handled for you. Payout fees are 5% on the Business and Advanced plans and drop to 3% on Enterprise. For a team currently stitching together a spreadsheet, a tracking tool, and manual bank transfers, this is the part of Dub that replaces the most separate products, and it is tightly coupled to the conversion data rather than bolted on.

Dub Analytics

Beyond conversions, the analytics view gives real time click data broken down by country, city, device, browser, referrer, and UTM parameters, alongside funnel and customer journey visualizations. Data retention scales with the plan, from 30 days on the free tier up to five years on Advanced and unlimited on Enterprise, so historical reporting improves as you move up the ladder.

The Developer API

Dub ships a documented REST API with official SDKs for TypeScript, Go, Python, PHP, and Ruby, plus real time webhooks and deferred deep linking. Programmatic link creation is treated as a first class use case, which is why so many customers are software companies embedding link generation inside their own apps. Because the platform is open source, teams that want to audit the code or self host have that option as well.

Pricing

Dub is a freemium product with a genuinely usable free tier and four paid steps above it. The prices below are month to month, and yearly billing carries a 10% discount.

• Free ($0): 25 new links a month, 1,000 tracked events, one user, 3 custom domains, and 30 day analytics retention.
• Pro ($30 per month): 1,000 new links a month, 50,000 tracked events, 3 users, 10 custom domains, and 1 year retention.
• Business ($90 per month): 10,000 new links, 250,000 tracked events, 10 users, 100 custom domains, 3 year retention, and Partners access with $2,500 in monthly payouts.
• Advanced ($300 per month): 50,000 new links, 1,000,000 tracked events, 20 users, 250 custom domains, 5 year retention, and $15,000 in monthly payouts.
• Enterprise (custom pricing): unlimited links, events, users, and domains, reduced 3% payout fees, SAML and SSO, audit logs, and a dedicated SLA.

The Business and Advanced plans cover both the Links product and the Partners program, so the affiliate features do not sit behind a separate subscription. A 14 day trial is available on the paid tiers. New users who sign up through the link on this page get 20% off for the first three months, which lowers the cost of testing Pro or Business before committing.

Who It Is For

Dub fits marketing and growth teams that care about attribution rather than link counts, and it fits software companies that want to create and track links programmatically. The Partners product makes it a particularly strong choice for any business launching or scaling an affiliate or referral program, since it folds link tracking, commission logic, and payouts into one place instead of three. Teams that already live in a developer stack will also appreciate that the API and open source code let them wire Dub into existing workflows.

It is less suited to someone who only needs to shorten the occasional link and share it, where a free consumer shortener does the job, or to a team with no interest in measuring what happens after the click. The value of Dub is highest when the click is the start of a revenue path you genuinely intend to follow. If that matches how you work, the free tier is a low commitment way to see whether the attribution data changes how you spend, and the paid steps scale cleanly as volume grows.