Short answer: yes, Linktree is free, and not just as a limited trial. You can build a page, add unlimited links and put it in your bio without ever entering a card number. But "free" comes with real edges, and if you're a creator who recommends products rather than just linking out, those edges show up fast.
That question, "is Linktree free," usually hides a second one: free enough for what? A student sharing three social profiles and a creator pushing dozens of affiliate links every week hit very different walls on the same free plan. Here's exactly what the free plan includes, what actually costs money, and a truly free alternative built specifically for affiliate recommendations rather than a stack of buttons.
Is Linktree free? The short answer
Yes. Linktree's free plan is a real, permanent tier, not a time-limited trial you get pushed off after 14 days. You get:
- Unlimited links on your page
- A basic customizable theme (colors, a profile photo, a bio)
- Your own Linktree bio link to drop into Instagram, TikTok or wherever
- Basic click analytics
That's enough for plenty of people whose only need is "collect my links in one place." Notably, the link count itself isn't the limiter, you won't hit a wall for adding a 20th or 50th link on free. Where it gets more complicated is everything just outside that basic list.
What the Linktree free plan includes
Beyond the basics above, the free tier also gives you a handful of blocks to embed: a video, a music player, a countdown, a simple contact form. The mobile app mirrors the web editor, so you can add or reorder links from your phone between posts. It's genuinely usable as a starting point, and a lot of small creators never leave it.
What it keeps, though, is the Linktree logo on your page. Every free-tier link-in-bio tool has to make money somewhere, and branding is the lever most of them pull first, it costs the company nothing to leave on, and it doubles as free advertising for Linktree itself every time someone taps through your bio.
What costs money on Linktree
The paid tiers, Starter, Pro and Premium, sit on top of the free base and unlock, roughly in order of what creators ask for first:
- Removing the Linktree logo from your page
- Deeper click analytics (traffic sources, device breakdowns, time trends)
- Scheduled and expiring links
- More advanced customization (fonts, animations, custom domains on higher tiers)
- Commerce and monetization tools, tip jars, digital product sales, integrated checkout
| Free | Paid tiers | |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited links | Yes | Yes |
| Basic theme & bio link | Yes | Yes |
| Linktree branding removed | No | Yes |
| Deep click analytics | No | Yes |
| Scheduled/expiring links | No | Yes |
| Built-in store & checkout | No | Yes, with a seller fee on sales |
That last row is the one worth reading twice: if you sell through Linktree's own store, it isn't just a subscription cost, it's also a percentage fee on top of the sale. That's separate from what you'd pay for a plan, and it's the detail people searching "does Linktree cost money" usually haven't found yet.
"Free" with an asterisk: where creators hit the wall
The free plan holds up fine for a personal bio link. It starts to strain for a specific kind of creator: someone whose job is recommending other brands' products, beauty, lifestyle, tech gear, with affiliate links and promo codes.
Two things bite here. First, the format: Linktree's free tier is a vertical list of buttons. A button labeled "Shop my faves" doesn't do much persuading on its own, no photo, no context, no reason to trust the recommendation beyond the label. Second, the branding: your bio page is carrying someone else's logo, at the exact moment you're asking your audience to trust your taste.
Neither of those is really about price. You could pay for Linktree Pro, remove the logo, unlock the deep analytics, and still end up with a page built around plain buttons rather than product cards, because Pro upgrades the tier, not the underlying format. If a bare button labeled with a brand name has never been the thing that convinced you to buy something, that's the gap a recommendation-first tool is trying to close.
A truly free alternative for affiliate creators: Spotilink
Spotilink's free plan is also genuinely free indefinitely, not a trial, and it's built around a different unit than a button: a product card. Each card carries your own photo, your honest take, a click-to-copy promo code and your affiliate link, deliberately with no price shown, so the card's whole job is earning a qualified click to the merchant rather than looking like a price list.
-10%Rare Beauty
Soft Pinch Blush
« My everyday blush, one sweep and it lasts all day. »
The free plan gives you 10 product cards, a custom URL (Linktree keeps that behind a paid plan), and basic click stats. Like Linktree free, it keeps a small "Created with Spotilink" watermark, that's the trade-off that funds the free tier, not something either tool hides. Upgrading to the Creator plan at €9.90/month removes the watermark, unlocks unlimited cards, paid brand collabs and deeper insights (click-through rate, conversion, monthly growth).
Picture a skincare creator with eight go-to products they recommend on repeat. On a Linktree free page, that's eight identical buttons labeled with brand names, indistinguishable from each other until someone taps through. On a Spotilink free page, each of those eight is a card: the creator's own photo of the product, a line on why they use it, a click-to-copy promo code, and the affiliate link, still well inside the 10-card free cap. Same number of products, a page built to actually sell the recommendation rather than just list it.
Where the free plans genuinely diverge: Linktree's free tier is a branded list of buttons; Spotilink's is a branded set of recommendation cards built for affiliate creators specifically, your photo, your take, your promo code, all pointed at your own affiliate link, with 0% commission on your affiliate earnings either way, free or paid. Both track clicks only, never sales figures or euro amounts.
The real difference isn't the free tier, it's the cut on earnings
Once you're past the free-vs-paid question, the number that actually matters for an affiliate creator is what happens to money you're already earning. Linktree's built-in store takes a seller fee of up to roughly 12% on direct sales made through it. Spotilink doesn't run a store at all, it drives clicks to your existing affiliate links, and takes 0% of your affiliate commissions on either plan, free or Creator. The commission that matters here is strictly what the brand pays you for the sale, never a cut Spotilink itself takes, and the metric Spotilink shows you is clicks, never a sales total or a euro figure.
Add EU hosting and GDPR-first data handling, and a Creator plan at €9.90/month that's priced under Linktree's mid-tier while staying unlimited on cards, and the gap isn't about which tool has a free plan (both do), it's about what each one is optimized to do with the traffic you send it. If pricing across the category is what you're weighing, see the full plan breakdown alongside the free tier.
Which free plan fits you?
- You just need one link that fans out to several others (your latest video, your shop, your other socials) → Linktree's free plan covers that fine, and there's no reason to switch just for switching's sake.
- You recommend products with affiliate links and promo codes, and want the page itself to help convert → a card-based free plan like Spotilink's is built for that job specifically, the format does part of the persuading a plain button can't.
- You want both, a general link hub and a dedicated product-recommendation page → nothing stops you running one for general links and the other for affiliate recommendations; they solve different problems.
- You're not sure yet → both are free to try with no card required, so building a page on each and comparing how your own links look is the fastest way to decide. Here's a fuller side-by-side if you want it: best Linktree alternatives.
If you're still deciding whether Linktree itself is the right starting point, what Linktree is and how it works covers the basics before you compare alternatives.
Start free in 15 minutes
Both Linktree and Spotilink let you start for free today, no card, no trial clock running out. The honest takeaway is that "is Linktree free" has a simple yes for an answer, the harder question is which free plan is actually built for what you do with it. If your bio link's job is turning recommendations into affiliate clicks rather than just listing links, building your first product cards takes about 15 minutes, and you'll know within your first ten cards whether the format fits.