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 3 redirect rules and 25,000 redirects a month on it — enough to try the product for real: test how rule matching handles your paths, spin up a quick vanity link, watch the analytics fill in, all before you 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 every domain is now scanned and validated before a redirect can go live, on every plan, not just the free tier. A paying customer can point a redirect at a phishing page just as easily as a free signup can, so the check runs the same way regardless of what you're paying. This is an ongoing pipeline, not a one-time gate, and we're continuing to improve it to keep our customers safe.
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 think RedirectIQ is the best redirect platform out there — the richest feature set, the fastest edge network, the strongest security — and we want as many people as possible to actually try it, not just read about it. A free redirect host with zero commitment, not even a domain of your own, is how we get it in front of them. Bringing your own domain at $1/mo is the next step once you're ready to put this in front of your own customers, running under your own brand.
What's next
The free subdomain is a first step toward something bigger we're building: verified proxy endpoints. RedirectIQ can already serve another site's content through a path on your domain, invisibly — point /shop at your Shopify store or /blog at your WordPress install, with no reverse proxy or origin server of your own to run (see reverse proxy rules). What's coming is a verified layer on top of that, plus an optional public page showing exactly what's live where, so a domain running RedirectIQ becomes a single, trustworthy front door for every property behind it — no infrastructure to build or host to make it happen.
That's the direction we're headed: consolidating everything you run under one domain, entirely at the edge. The free tier is how we get this in front of as many real setups as possible before it ships — the more of them we see, the faster we prove this out.
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.