zws

zws shortens URLs into invisible characters. The link is real and it resolves, but the visible portion is zero width Unicode, so what you paste looks like nothing at all. It is a gimmick, and it is also a working service with a documented API and a real database underneath it.

The stack is TypeScript and Next.js on Postgres, self-hostable if you want your own invisible domain. There is a public instance at zws.im, an API with documentation, statistics endpoints, and a ShareX integration for people who paste screenshots all day long.

Free under Apache 2.0 with no paid tier, funded through OpenCollective. Nobody should build a marketing attribution stack on this. Use it for a joke in a group chat, a puzzle, an easter egg in a conference talk, or the specific pleasure of watching someone try to read a link that is not there.

The catch is that an invisible link is indistinguishable from phishing to any security filter that inspects it. Slack, Outlook, and most corporate mail gateways will strip it or flag it. That is not a defect in zws, it is the predictable result of hiding a URL on purpose. For anything with actual stakes use thedevs-network/kutt or shlinkio/shlink.