What is EthioLink? The Ethiopian URL Shortener Built for Every Language

If you run anything online in Ethiopia — a shop, a news page, a church, a football club, a delivery service — you have probably sent someone a link that looked like this: https://your-shop.example.com/collections/new-arrivals-2026?utm_source=telegram. Nobody reads that aloud. Nobody types it correctly. Worst of all, it does not fit cleanly into an SMS or a social post with a character limit.

EthioLink is a link shortener for that problem, and it is built in Ethiopia, for Ethiopian users, in Ethiopian languages. This post explains what it does in plain language: what a short link is, what codes you can choose, what the analytics show, what it costs, and how to start.

What is EthioLink?

EthioLink is a URL shortener: you give it a long web address, and it gives you back a short link on the short.et domain that redirects to it. Every click on that short link is counted and described — how many people clicked, from which countries, on what device, coming from where.

Three things make it different from the international shorteners most people have used:

• Codes in Ethiopian scripts. You can claim a code written in Ge'ez script — ዜና, ዳቦ, ቡና — not only Latin letters like zena or buna.
• Two codes for every link. Each link is reachable by its main code and by a second, automatically generated twin, so the same link works in systems that only accept plain ASCII.
• It is designed around Ethiopian usage. Plans are priced in birr, SMS and Telegram campaigns are the assumed first channel, and the analytics are built for small teams reading them on a phone.

That last point is why the product exists. Most URL shorteners treat Ethiopian languages as an edge case to be sanitised away — strip the non-ASCII characters, fall back to random Latin letters, move on. EthioLink treats Ge'ez as a first-class alphabet, because for a large part of its audience that is simply the alphabet people read every day.

What you can actually do with it

Short links in your language

Custom codes accept 2 to 30 characters drawn from Amharic/Ge'ez letters (the Ethiopic Unicode range), Latin letters, digits, hyphen and underscore. That is broader than "Amharic only": it covers any Ethiopian language written in Ge'ez script (Amharic, Tigrinya, and others) and any language written in Latin script (Oromo, Somali, Afar, Sidaama, and more).

Two practical notes. Some words are already taken on purpose: a small list of brand and institution codes (Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Ethiopian public institutions among them) is reserved, and trying to use one returns a message naming the organisation that owns it. A reserved code can be requested through an ownership claim instead, which is available on the Business and Enterprise plans and is approved by an administrator. And if you would rather not think about the alphabet at all, leave the code box empty — EthioLink generates a random code for you, in Ge'ez glyphs or in Latin letters, depending on how the service is configured.

The twin-code system

Here is the feature that matters most for real-world reach. Unicode links such as short.et/ዜና work in every modern browser, but plenty of software still mishandles non-ASCII URLs: old SMS gateways, some point-of-sale and print systems, QR tooling with narrow alphabets, and a long tail of internal tools that mangle the characters on the way through.

So every link gets a second code as well. For a Ge'ez code, EthioLink transliterates the syllables into Latin letters when that candidate is still free — the real output for ዜና is zena, and for ኤርትራ it is erotora. When the transliterated form is already taken, or produces something unusable, the twin is a generated code instead. Both codes point to the same destination, and both are counted in your analytics.

In practice you publish the code that suits the channel: the Ge'ez one on a poster or in a Telegram post, the Latin twin in an SMS gateway or a legacy system. You can also hand out both and let people use whichever they can type. The multilingual guide goes deeper on this with worked examples per language.

Analytics you can read

Each click is recorded in the background — a redirect never waits for the analytics write. For every link you get total clicks and a daily chart; on paid plans the breakdown goes much further:

• Countries the clicks came from, resolved offline from the visitor's IP address (country level, not city).
• Device, browser and operating system, derived from the user-agent string.
• Referrers — which site or app sent the visit, with direct traffic separated out.
• Unique and returning visitors, using a first-party visitor cookie so a person who clicks twice is not counted twice.
• Busiest hours, and visitor journeys across several of your links.

There is a quieter design choice here too: EthioLink stores a salted one-way hash of the visitor IP address rather than the address itself, and it never sees the page behind your link. The Privacy Policy lists exactly what is collected, what is not, and where the service runs.

For businesses and teams

• Team workspaces with owner, admin and member roles, so a marketing team can share one account without sharing one password.
• API access for creating links from your own systems — order confirmations, SMS campaigns, a CMS. There is a developer walkthrough and full documentation on the API keys page.
• Webhook notifications that POST every click to your own endpoint, signed with HMAC-SHA256 so you can verify it really came from EthioLink.
• White-label branding for shared reports, and the option to put your own logo in the centre of the QR codes your workspace generates.
• Uptime/SLA visibility and email digests that summarise click activity without anyone opening a dashboard.

QR codes

Every short link has a printable QR code at a public endpoint: GET /api/qr/{code}. It needs no API key, returns an SVG, and takes a size parameter (scale=4-40) plus a logo choice, including none if you want to lay the code over your own artwork. The dashboard also exports a large PNG for print. Because the QR always encodes the current short link, you can change where a link points later without reprinting the code.

How to use EthioLink

1. Create a free account at short.et/register with your email address and a password. Confirm the verification email.
2. Paste the long URL you want to shorten — any http:// or https:// address.
3. Optionally choose a code. Type a memorable word in Ge'ez script or Latin letters, or leave it empty and let EthioLink generate one.
4. Get your short link — plus its twin, its QR code, and a copy button.
5. Share it wherever your audience is: Telegram, Instagram bio, SMS, a poster, a business card, an invoice.

From the dashboard you can search your links, edit a destination when a campaign moves, and see clicks per link. Links you create while signed in belong to your account. The homepage also lets you shorten a link without an account — that is useful for a one-off, but create your links while signed in if you want them listed, editable and measured in your own dashboard.

What makes EthioLink different

It is built for this market, not adapted to it. Ge'ez script is not a plugin or a workaround bolted onto an English product; it is core to how codes are generated, validated, transliterated and displayed. The interface itself is bilingual, and the Amharic labels are written for Ethiopian users.

Local payment reality. Plans are priced in Ethiopian birr rather than dollars, so a small monthly cost is not exposed to a currency conversion, and the payment flow is built around providers Ethiopian businesses already use.

Honest data handling. There is no advertising network and no data broker involved. IP addresses are hashed rather than stored, so the analytics describe a click without identifying the person behind it. The Privacy Policy explains what is collected, why, how long it is kept and where the service runs — plainly, in 14 short sections.

One product, not a reseller. Short links, QR codes, analytics, the API, teams and webhooks are the same codebase; the features work together instead of being separate subscriptions from separate vendors.

What EthioLink is not: it does not offer custom domains on your own hostname, or city-level geographic data. If those are requirements, it is better to know before you compare products. Since v0.7.0 it does include creator pages — one link for your bio, with every destination behind it — which are described in the creator guide.

What it costs

Two things worth stating clearly, because they differ from how most competitors sell. Paid plans are activated after a request and an administrator approval, so nobody is charged by accident halfway through signing up. And the free plan is a real plan, not a trial: up to 50 links with no expiry, no card, and no advertising attached. For the full comparison — anonymous use, Free, Starter, Business and Enterprise — see the account types guide. Institutions evaluating EthioLink against a security questionnaire can start with the local compliance hub, which answers the hosting, PDPP and data-export questions in one place.

Start shortening links today

If you want to try the multilingual behaviour for yourself, the fastest path is thirty seconds long: create an account, paste a URL, and type a code in the alphabet you actually think in. Then send it to one person and watch the click appear.