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Dub

Open-source link attribution platformOpen source

About Dub

Dub is an open-source link attribution platform that grew out of a URL shortener. It bundles short links, conversion tracking and affiliate programs (Dub Partners): partners get unique links, Dub logs clicks, signups and payments, and pays commissions in one batch. The code is mostly AGPL-3.0, with a few enterprise directories under a commercial license. Ex-Vercel staffer Steven Tey began it in 2022 as a side project and incorporated in early 2024, raising $2M from backers including OSS Capital and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. Hosted plans run from free to $300 a month; Enterprise is custom.

EditorialUpdated 10 min read

What it does

Marketers often cannot say which post, creator or partner actually produced revenue. A plain short link records how many people clicked and then loses the trail before signup and payment. Affiliate programs add more work: someone has to track each promoter's sales, calculate commissions, pay people in different countries and collect tax forms, often in spreadsheets. Dub is designed to tie that whole chain to a single link.

Its docs page "How attribution works" lays out three stages. When a visitor clicks, Dub logs the click on the server (country, city, device, referrer, UTM parameters and so on) before redirecting, and appends a dub_id parameter to the destination URL. Dub's script on the site stores it as a first-party cookie that lasts 90 days by default. When the visitor signs up or submits a form, the backend calls track.lead to tie that customer to the click. When they pay, track.sale credits the revenue to the partner who drove the original click and creates a commission record under the program's rules. Attribution is last-click by default, with first-click as an option.

There are now two product lines. Dub Links covers short links and analytics: custom domains, QR codes, UTM templates, folders, deep links and A/B tests. Dub Partners runs affiliate and referral programs: recruiting partners, rewards per click, lead or sale, dual-sided discounts for referred customers, an embeddable referral dashboard, and one-click global payouts with invoices (Introducing Dub Partners, 2025-08-12).

The history, from the company blog and About page: Dub launched on 2022-09-22 as an open-source side project at dub.sh, and rebranded to dub.co on 2023-08-21. On 2024-01-17 Steven Tey announced he was starting a company around it, with himself as CEO. Later that year it passed a SOC 2 Type II audit and shipped a public API with SDKs. Conversion tracking (Dub Conversions) arrived on 2025-01-14 and Partners opened to everyone on 2025-08-12. In 2026 it added USDC payouts, an MCP server and a marketplace of partner programs. The company blog says Tey first built it at Vercel to handle sharing links on social platforms. TechCrunch (2025-01-16) adds that at Vercel he couldn't tell how developer-advocacy work turned into revenue, which planted the seed for attribution.

The repo (2026-10-25) was created on 2022-08-28 and is written in TypeScript. It has never published a GitHub Release; it's a continuously deployed SaaS codebase. The README's stack list: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, Prisma, Upstash, Tinybird, PlanetScale, NextAuth.js, BoxyHQ, Turborepo, Stripe, Resend and Vercel.

Dub is the modern, open-source link attribution platform for short links, conversion tracking, and affiliate programs.

Dub README

Key features

Server-side attribution. The click is recorded on the server before the redirect, and a first-party cookie links clicks, leads and sales. Lead events are deduplicated by customer ID plus event name, and sale events can carry an invoice ID for idempotency, so revenue isn't double-counted and commission isn't double-paid (official docs).

Affiliate programs in one place. Rewards can be per click, per lead, revenue share or flat commission. Programs can offer dual-sided discounts, generate a recruiting page with AI and embed a referral dashboard in the customer's app. The company blog says that by late 2025 a single payout could reach up to 100,000 partners, with the customer paying one invoice and Dub routing the funds (2025-12-10).

Faster cross-border payouts. Since 2026-03-18 partners can choose USDC. Dub says the money arrives in minutes rather than the up to 15 business days a bank transfer can take, with a 0.5% fee versus a 1% FX fee on international bank payouts. According to the company, it is the first major affiliate platform to support crypto payouts.

Built for AI agents. An MCP server launched on 2026-05-21 lets agents in Claude, Perplexity, Codex and similar tools create, list and deactivate partners and manage links. Platform Logs, released alongside it, show every request agents or teammates make to the workspace.

A full link toolkit. Custom domains, QR codes, UTM templates, tags, folders, deep links, A/B testing and event webhooks are all on the Links plans, and Pro and above include a free .link domain (pricing page, 2026-10-25).

Security and compliance. The company blog says Dub completed a SOC 2 Type II audit in 2024, with a clean opinion from the auditor, Sensiba (2024-10-28). Enterprise adds SAML/SSO and audit logs.

How it compares

Dub straddles two categories, so it has two sets of rivals.

Link management: Bitly, Rebrandly, Short.io and others. These are closed-source. Dub has public code, an API-first design and links wired straight into signup and payment events.

Affiliate and referral platforms. Dub has published a comparison post against each of Rewardful, PartnerStack, FirstPromoter, Tolt and others, and what follows is Dub's side of the story. It says Rewardful's bulk payouts depend on the customer's own PayPal Business and Wise Business accounts, with CSV uploads and manual retries for failures, and no tax help; Dub pays partners itself and collects tax forms. It describes PartnerStack, founded in 2015, as an early leader in SaaS partner management, but cites PartnerStack's own FAQ saying a program generally takes 74 days to go live, while Dub says most teams finish setting up in one to two hours. All of this comes from one competitor about another.

The open-source angle. Dub's source is public. Self-hosting comes with two conditions: self-hosting depends on several hosted services and has no Docker support, and the enterprise directories aren't AGPL, so production use needs a commercial subscription.

Who uses it, and who it's for

Public interest (as of 2026-10-25): 24,936 GitHub stars, 3,339 forks and 111 open issues. The GitHub API ties 88 contributors to accounts (2026-10-25).

Usage figures all come from Dub. The README claims more than 100M clicks and 2M links a month (no date given) and names Twilio, Buffer, Framer, Perplexity, Vercel and Laravel as customers. The company blog says Partners paid out $10M to partners within six months of launch (2025-12-10), and the About page says that doubled to more than $20M a little over 5 months later. Its case studies say Framer sends more than $900k a month in affiliate payouts through Dub, Chatbase grew affiliate revenue 318% after moving from Rewardful, and Tella grew 38%. These are vendor case studies. TechCrunch (2025-01-16) also reported that Dub was working with the Malaysian government, which is using the open-source code to build a link shortener and tracker for its agencies, and that Huberman Lab tracks affiliates with Dub.

Who it's for

Subscription software companies setting up an affiliate or referral program. Partners puts tracking, commission maths, a partner portal and global payouts in one place, and native Stripe and Shopify integrations send sales back automatically, with no tools to stitch together.

Growth and marketing teams that care about accurate attribution. Clicks are logged server-side and conversions come from the backend, which ad blockers can't easily strip out the way they can a front-end pixel. Revenue can be broken down by partner, country and device.

Developers who need programmable links. There's a public API, official SDKs, webhooks and an MCP server, so creating links, pulling data and managing partners can be handed to code or AI agents.

Anyone who wants to read a large production Next.js codebase. Everything from the redirect middleware to billing is public.

Not for

Individuals who only need a short link and the odd click count. The free tier gives 25 new links and 1,000 tracked events a month with 30 days of history. For that use, a full attribution platform is overkill.

Teams that want a one-command Docker deployment on their own servers. The official guide says Docker isn't supported, and self-hosting means signing up for Tinybird, Upstash, PlanetScale and Vercel, which is a long way from keeping all data in-house.

Cost-sensitive companies with large partner payouts. Partners plans charge a 5% fee on payouts on top of the monthly price (3% on Enterprise), so the more commission a company pays, the more Dub takes.

Getting started

The hosted service at dub.co starts on the free tier. Every paid plan has a 14-day trial, and the trial is limited to 50 partners, $500 a month in payouts, 100 new links and 5,000 analytics events a month, 5 domains and 3 teammates (Help Center article on the free 14-day trial, 2026-10-25).

The basic use is links: a custom short domain, links with UTM tags and real-time analytics. Conversion tracking needs Dub's analytics script on the site, which stores dub_id as a first-party cookie, plus a track.lead call in the signup handler and a track.sale call in the payment webhook. Stripe and Shopify have native integrations (official docs). One of Dub's comparison posts includes a prompt for a coding agent to implement tracking for a given stack.

Affiliate programs are configured in Partners with reward rules, a recruiting page and payout options; partners sign up and get their own links.

Self-hosting follows a nine-step official guide: clone the repo into a public GitHub repository, then set up Tinybird, Upstash Redis and QStash, a PlanetScale-compatible MySQL database, GitHub OAuth and Cloudflare R2 (or S3), optionally Resend and Unsplash, and deploy to Vercel. The guide notes that distributing the code or letting users interact with it remotely triggers the AGPLv3 duty to provide the source, modifications included. For local development the README recommends Node v23.11.0 and pnpm 9.15.9.

Pricing & license

Prices are monthly, from the official pricing page (as of 2026-10-25). Paying yearly gets 10% off, with 12 months of usage up front.

Dub Links: Free costs $0 and includes 1,000 tracked events and 25 new links a month, 3 custom domains, 30 days of analytics and 1 user. Pro is $30 a month for 50,000 events, 1,000 new links and a year of history, plus a free .link domain, folders and deep links.

Dub Partners (Links features included): Business is $90 a month with $2,500 in monthly partner payouts, up to 500 partners, 10,000 new links, 250,000 events, 3 years of history, 100 domains, 10 users and 1,200 API requests a minute. Advanced is $300 a month with $15,000 in payouts, unlimited partners, 50,000 new links, 1 million events, 5 years of history, 250 domains, 20 users and 3,000 API requests a minute. Both charge a 5% payout fee. Enterprise is custom annual billing with a 3% payout fee, SAML/SSO and audit logs. A startup program gives 50% off the first year (About page). Dub also runs its own affiliate program, paying 30% per referral for up to 12 months, with referred users getting 20% off their first 3 months (company blog, 2025-04-02).

Prices have gone up more than once. The 2024-01-19 pricing change set Pro at $24 a month ($19 billed yearly) and kept early users at $9. Today Pro is $30 and Business $90.

The license is open core. LICENSE.md puts everything under AGPLv3 except apps/web/app/(ee) and apps/web/app/app.dub.co/(dashboard)/[slug]/(ee), which fall under the Dub.co Commercial License: that code may be copied and modified for development and testing, but production use requires a valid Enterprise Edition subscription and distribution is forbidden. The README puts that share at about 1% of the code.

Risks & limits

AGPL obligations. Offering a modified Dub to others as a network service means giving those users the modified source, as the self-hosting guide points out.

Self-hosting dependencies. The guide states it currently relies on Tinybird, Upstash, PlanetScale and Vercel and doesn't support Docker; swapping in native MySQL, Redis and ClickHouse is listed as a future plan.

There's no version to pin. With no GitHub Releases and a main branch that ships straight to the SaaS, self-hosters have to choose commits and merge upstream changes themselves.

Most headline numbers are self-reported. The 100M monthly clicks, the $20M in payouts and the customers' revenue gains all come from Dub's own pages, and the competitor comparisons are written by Dub. The repo's security advisories page lists no published advisories (as of 2026-10-25).

Attribution is only as good as the cookie and the integration. The first-party cookie lasts 90 days by default; if a user switches devices, clears cookies or the backend doesn't pass dub_id correctly, the conversion is lost. Last-click attribution can also spark disputes between partners.

The team is small. The About page lists six people and calls itself a small but mighty team.

Our verdict

What sets Dub apart: it ties clicks, signups, payments and commission payouts into one chain, with the code in the open; it has a public API, official SDKs, webhooks and an MCP server, and native Stripe and Shopify integrations.

Its limits: the enterprise directories fall under a commercial license, and offering a modified Dub as a network service requires publishing the source under the AGPL; self-hosting relies on Tinybird, Upstash, PlanetScale and Vercel, with no Docker support; Partners plans add a 5% fee on payouts; most headline numbers are self-reported.

Why it stands out

Dub started as a short link tool and grew into an attribution platform for marketing teams, with analytics, an API that developers actually like using, and, now at the centre of the business, Dub Partners: software for running affiliate and partner programs, from conversion tracking to partner payouts. It is open source and self-hostable, which is unusual for the category. Per the official self-hosting guide, though, self-hosting currently depends on hosted services including Tinybird, Upstash, PlanetScale and Vercel, and Docker is not supported yet.

Steven Tey built it while working at Vercel; the project launched in 2022, and in early 2024 he started a company around Dub and runs it full time.

It is open source and covers short links, analytics, an API and partner programs, from conversion tracking to payouts.

Sources

Official

  1. dubinc/dub (GitHub)GitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  2. Dub READMEGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  3. dub/LICENSE.md at main · dubinc/dubGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  4. dub/apps/web/app/(ee)/LICENSE.md at main · dubinc/dubGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  5. dubinc/dub ReleasesGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026

Security advisories

  1. Security Advisories · dubinc/dubGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026

Media & third party

  1. REST API endpoints for repositories - GitHub DocsGitHub Docs · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  2. Free 14-day trial - Dubdub.co · Accessed Oct 25, 2026

Updates & reading