The Comics Aggregator previously used Bitly to generate sharing links for comics pages. Unfortunately, Bitly has recently changed their pricing model, and the aggregator’s use of the service has gone from being free to costing $35 per month. I can’t afford to spend that on a feature that I personally never use, so I’ve turned off link-shortening for sharing links in the aggregator. This unfortunately means that the sharing links are now longer and more unwieldy.
I will pay Bitly and turn Bitly sharing links back on if I get $42 per month of new supporters on my Patreon page (I need to ask for more than what Bitly is charging because of sales tax and Patreon’s fees). Whether it stays turned on will remain dependent on whether I have enough recurring support via Patreon to keep paying for it. I am already subsidizing this service by paying for the servers and bandwidth out of my own pocket; I can’t subsidize it more than that.
The aggregator is visited by over 150 users every week. I have only four supporters on Patreon. If you want services like this to exist, you have to support them.
P.S. In the process of turning off Bitly I noticed a bug which was preventing Comics Kingdom sharing from working; this has now been fixed. See the user guide if you’re interested in reading Comics Kingdom strips through the aggregator.
