Introducing the RedirectIQ Free Tier: A Live Redirect Host in Seconds
Today every new RedirectIQ signup gets a working redirect host the moment they finish creating an account — no DNS record to add, no domain to own yet, nothing to verify. This is the first of a few changes we're making to how people get started with RedirectIQ, and to how the free/paid line is drawn. Here's what shipped.
The problem we kept running into
RedirectIQ has always needed a domain to work with — add example.com, point a CNAME at us, verify a TXT record, wait for a certificate to issue, and only then can you create your first redirect rule. That's a completely reasonable ask for someone who already knows they want to use RedirectIQ for real. It's a bad first five minutes for someone who just wants to see if the thing works before they touch their live domain's DNS.
Most accounts stalled right there, at the DNS step, before ever seeing a single redirect actually happen.
What ships today
Every new account gets yourname.free.redirectiq.com — a subdomain we already own and host, live within seconds of picking a name. Point it at anything with a redirect rule and it just works, immediately, with no DNS changes on your end. You get up to 10 redirect rules on it, which is plenty to try the product for real: test a migration, spin up a quick vanity link, see how rule matching and analytics behave before you ever commit a real domain.
It's deliberately not a full-featured plan. Proxy mode — routing a live domain's real traffic through our edge — stays off the free subdomain. That's both our strongest upgrade path (if you want full proxying, you've outgrown "free") and the highest-risk feature to hand an unverified, no-payment-method signup, so it's the one thing we held back.
One detail worth calling out: this bonus subdomain isn't Free-plan-exclusive. Every account gets one, including existing Hobby, Pro, and Agency customers. Your real domains keep your plan's full feature set exactly as before — the free subdomain is just an extra space every account gets, and that one space always plays by free-tier rules regardless of what you're paying for everywhere else.
Safety checks, now on every plan
Handing out subdomains on our own zone to anyone with an email address meant thinking harder about abuse — a slug that impersonates a brand, or a redirect destination pointed at something malicious, is a reputation problem for redirectiq.com itself, not just for the account that created it.
So we built a slug- and destination-safety check and shipped it everywhere, not just on the free tier. A paying customer is just as capable of pointing a redirect at a phishing page as a free signup is — the fact that a card is on file doesn't make a destination safe. Every rule you create, on every plan, now runs through the same check before it goes live.
Hobby is now $1/mo — existing customers pay nothing
Hobby — your own custom domain, full feature set — used to be RedirectIQ's free plan. It's now $1/mo. If you're already on Hobby, this doesn't affect you: your account is grandfathered at $0, permanently. No card required, no action needed, nothing changes for you. This only affects new Hobby signups going forward.
The reasoning: we wanted "free" to mean the lowest-friction thing we could offer — a redirect host with zero commitment, not even a domain of your own — and "bring your own domain" to be the natural first paid step instead of sharing a tier with a $0 plan that also expected you to already own a domain and wire up DNS.
What's next
This is the first piece of a broader push on the free-to-paid path, not the whole thing. Still coming: upgrade prompts that name exactly what you hit instead of a bare error ("you've used all 10 free rules" instead of a generic limit message), and a way to carry your rules over when you move from the free subdomain to a real domain, so upgrading doesn't feel like starting over.
If you want to try it, get started free — no domain, no card, no DNS. Existing customers can see everything that shipped in the changelog.