Create a Real Edge Redirect in Seconds — No Server, No Account

Enter any URL below. We'll create a real redirect — served from Cloudflare's global edge network — and hand you a working link you can click and share right now. No account, no credit card, expires in 24 hours.

That redirect just went live globally. It's a real 302 response, not a simulation — if you share that link with someone in Tokyo, they get redirected from a Cloudflare data center near Tokyo.

Why stateless, and what that gets you

Most demo features store something: a database row, a session, a record that needs cleaning up. We didn't do that here, and it wasn't laziness — it was a deliberate security choice.

The redirect link you just created contains everything needed to serve the redirect. Your destination URL and a 24-hour expiry are encoded into the token itself, then signed with a secret key using HMAC-SHA256. When someone visits the link, the Cloudflare Worker at the edge reads the token, verifies the signature, checks the expiry, and issues the redirect — all without touching a database or making a network call to any origin server.

What this means in practice:

• Nothing to breach. There's no database storing your test URLs. Nothing was written anywhere when you created that redirect. An attacker who compromised our infrastructure would find no table of "URLs people tested."
• Nothing to fake. The signature makes it cryptographically impossible to forge a valid redirect to a different destination or extend the expiry. Every character of the token is covered.
• Nothing to clean up. The 24-hour expiry lives inside the token. When time runs out, the link simply stops working. No cron jobs, no TTL records, no orphaned rows.
• Can't be turned against internal systems. The API that generates tokens rejects private IP ranges, localhost, and link-local addresses. You can't use this feature to probe services that aren't on the public internet.

The result: we can offer this publicly, without authentication, at zero ongoing cost — because there's genuinely nothing stored to abuse.

For a full breakdown of how URL forwarding works — including the DNS and HTTP mechanics, when to use 301 vs 302, and what to look for in a forwarding service — see our URL Forwarder guide.

How production redirects work differently

The demo is intentionally minimal. Production RedirectIQ gives you permanent, manageable redirects with the full feature set:

• 301 or 302 — permanent or temporary, your choice per rule
• Path passthrough — /old/page automatically forwards to /new/page
• Click analytics — every redirect hit logged with device, country, referrer, and timestamp
• SSL auto-provisioned — connect any domain with a single CNAME, we handle the certificate
• Instant deploys — rule changes go live globally within seconds, no deployment pipeline

Automate it with the API

Everything the dashboard does, the API does. If you want to generate redirects programmatically — from a CMS, a CI/CD pipeline, or your own application — it's one POST:

POST https://app.redirectiq.com/api/v1/rules
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

{
  "domainId": "dom_abc123",
  "matchPath": "/old-page",
  "destination": "https://example.com/new-page",
  "redirectType": "301",
  "pathPassthrough": false,
  "queryPassthrough": true
}

The rule deploys to Cloudflare's edge within seconds. What you just did manually above, your application can do at scale. Full reference at redirectiq.com/developers.

When to use Cloudflare redirect rules directly

Cloudflare's built-in redirect rules are genuinely good and free. Use them if:

• You're technical and comfortable in the Cloudflare dashboard
• You need 10 or fewer redirects per domain (free plan limit)
• Your domain is already on Cloudflare nameservers
• You don't need to know how often a redirect fires or where traffic is coming from
• You're the only person who manages redirects

If all five of those are true, Cloudflare redirect rules are the right tool and you don't need anything else.

When Cloudflare redirect rules aren't enough

Most teams hit the limits faster than they expect:

	Cloudflare (free)	RedirectIQ
Rules per domain	10	Unlimited
Requires Cloudflare nameservers	Yes	No
Analytics per redirect	None	Clicks, referrer, country, device
Team access without full dashboard access	No	Yes
Multi-domain management	Separate zones	Single dashboard
API for programmatic rule management	Infrastructure-level only	Simple REST API
Bulk redirect import	Paid plan only	All plans

The gap that surfaces first is almost always analytics. When you set up a redirect for an old blog post or a vanity URL for a campaign, you naturally want to know if traffic is actually flowing through it. Cloudflare's redirect rules fire and forget — there's no record of it ever happening.

The second gap is team access. Giving a marketer or SEO contractor access to your Cloudflare zone to create a vanity URL means giving them access to your DNS, firewall rules, and SSL config. That's a security problem that doesn't have a clean solution inside Cloudflare.

RedirectIQ adds the product layer on top of Cloudflare's edge: your redirects still serve from Cloudflare's global network — same performance, same 20ms response times — but through a dashboard your whole team can use, with per-redirect analytics and an API that works like a redirect-specific service rather than infrastructure management.

Start free → — the Hobby plan is free forever with one domain and 10 redirect rules. No credit card required.