I've been using Dub.co for short link management on this blog — it handles the uneasy.in links that appear on every post. It's a well-made product. The dashboard is clean, the API is solid, and the analytics are genuinely useful. So when they announced folders last year as a way to organise links, I thought: great, I'll set up a proper structure. Blog links in one folder, project links in another, maybe a third for experiments.

Then I hit the limit. Three folders. That's it on the Pro plan at $25 a month.

Three folders is not an organisational system — it's a tease. It's the SaaS equivalent of giving someone a filing cabinet with three drawers welded shut and a price tag dangling from the fourth. If you want twenty folders, you'll need the Business plan at $75 a month. Fifty folders? That's $250 a month on Advanced. The jump from three to twenty costs you an extra $600 a year, and the primary thing you're paying for is the right to put links into named groups.

What makes this especially irritating is how clearly it's designed as a conversion lever rather than a technical constraint. Folders are metadata. They're a label on a row in a database. There's no compute cost, no storage overhead, no bandwidth implication. The limit exists purely to create friction — to let you taste the feature just enough that you'll upgrade when you inevitably need a fourth folder. It's the same pattern I've seen with other services: let you in at a reasonable price, then gate the basics behind a tier that costs three times as much.

The broader context makes it worse. Pro also caps you at 25 tags and 1,000 new links per month. Business unlocks unlimited tags — which tells you exactly how much those tag and folder limits cost Dub to enforce: nothing. They're artificial scarcity on a digital product, and the pricing tiers are structured so that basic organisational hygiene requires a plan designed for teams of ten.

I ended up cancelling the whole folder exercise. Not because I couldn't afford the upgrade, but because I don't want to reward a pricing model that treats elementary features as premium upsells. I'll keep using Dub for what it does well — the API, the custom domain, the click tracking — but the folders will stay empty. Three is too few to be useful and too many to ignore.

This is the quiet frustration of modern SaaS. The product is good. The engineering is thoughtful. And then someone in product or finance decides that the difference between $25 and $75 should be the ability to put things in named groups. It's a small thing, but small things accumulate. Every service you use has its own version of this — the feature that's obviously trivial to provide but sits just above your current tier, daring you to pay more for what should have been included from the start.

I remain a paying customer. But I'm filing this complaint in one of my three allotted folders.