D
Dub
👤 Steven Tey (Ex-Vercel DevRel with a large developer following; his viral hit ShareGPT gave Dub free reach before it charged a cent.)🌐 sitesteventey.com𝕏LinkedIn
A free, open-source URL shortener that became a paid attribution and affiliate-payout platform for marketers.
Will it work? · our read
Give, then charge. Dub gave away the shortener to win developers, then built the paid attribution and payout layer marketers budget for. The redirect is free; the data isn't.
01How the money moves
Open-source the URL shortener — free, dev-first
→
Teams adopt it for branded links + click analytics
→
Charge $90-300/mo for attribution + partner payouts
02The numbers
$10MStatedpaid to partners (not rev)
Dec 2025
Dub's own 1-year and 2024 milestones; no ARR is public.
$10M is money paid to creators through Dub Partners in 6 months (Dec 2025). Dub takes a fee on top plus $90-300/mo subscriptions, but discloses no revenue or ARR.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 441 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSources
Dub blog — $10M in partner payouts in 6 months (Dec 10, 2025)Dub blog — 1-year milestones: 900+ paying customers, 70K+ users (Jan 17, 2025)Dub — 2024 Year in Review: 126M clicks, 700K links, 56K new users, team of 4Dub pricing — Business $90/mo, Advanced $300/mo, Enterprise customSteven Tey — founder profile (ex-Vercel; ShareGPT, Novel, One Word Domains)
Every number here comes from a Dub page I opened directly. The headline $10M is money PAID OUT to creators through Dub Partners in 6 months (Dub blog, Dec 10 2025) — not Dub's revenue: Dub charges a fee on top plus $90-300/mo subscriptions, but publishes no revenue or ARR figure anywhere I could reach, so revenue is undisclosed and verified:false. First-party milestones I confirmed on Dub's blog: 900+ paying customers and 70K+ users (Jan 17 2025), 126M clicks and 700K links in 2024, team of 4. Pricing is from the live pricing page. Founder background (ex-Vercel; created ShareGPT, Novel) is from steventey.com. Rival bars are our rough read of mindshare/reach, not revenue. We never score you.