BEGINNER
DocsThe link lifecycle
A Kilo link is a small, long-lived thing: it’s created once and then moves through a handful of states over its life. Knowing those states - and knowing that none of them ends in a 404 - is most of what there is to understand about managing links.
Create and edit
You create a link by giving Kilo a destination; it hands back a short slug like qr2r.com/aA3k9. From that moment, the slug is fixed, but almost everything else about the link can be edited: the destination it forwards to, its human-readable name, the group it belongs to, and any routing rules attached to it. Editing the destination takes effect on the very next scan, everywhere, at once.
That separation - a permanent public slug in front of an editable private destination - is the point of the whole system. It’s what lets a printed QR or a link in someone’s bio stay correct for years while the thing it points at moves around.
Pause, archive, trash
A link has three independent ways of being “not fully live,” and they mean different things:
Paused is a temporary hold. A paused link still exists and still resolves - but instead of forwarding, it shows a branded page that says it’s paused, with a way to reactivate. Pausing is also what billing does automatically on a downgrade: rather than delete anything, Kilo pauses links that sit over your new plan’s capacity, keeping the oldest ones live because they’re the most likely to already be printed. A paused link counts toward neither your active nor your archived capacity.
Archived is a tidy retirement. You archive a link you’re done promoting but don’t want to lose. It stops being an active link and moves to the archived tab, out of your main working list, while staying recoverable.
Trashed is a soft delete. A trashed link goes to the trash tab and stops forwarding, but it isn’t gone - you can restore it. Nothing about a link is ever hard-deleted out from under you.
The rule underneath all three
None of these states produces a browser error. A paused, archived, or over-quota link resolves to a branded page that explains itself. The only thing that returns a true 404 is a slug that never existed. Your printed code always lands somewhere that makes sense.
Groups
A group is a folder for links that belong together - a campaign, a client, a print run. Grouping keeps analytics and management organized, and it unlocks a useful shortcut: a group can carry a default destination. Turn it on, and every link in the group forwards to the group’s destination instead of its own - including links you add to the group later.
That’s the fastest way to re-point a whole campaign at once. Ten codes on ten different flyers, all pointing through one group, can be redirected somewhere new by changing a single destination. Turn the override off, and each link goes back to following its own destination, untouched.
Verify any Kilo link
Because a Kilo link hides its destination, Kilo also gives anyone a way to check where a link leads before clicking it. Two ways, actually. Append a + to any Kilo link - qr2r.com/aA3k9+ - and instead of redirecting, you’ll see a preview of where it goes, the same trick people know from other link shorteners. Or use the public verify page and paste a link in.
This is a trust surface, not just a convenience. It means a Kilo link isn’t a black box: a cautious recipient can confirm a destination, and you can point skeptical customers at a way to check your links themselves. It’s the same principle as the never-404 rule - the link should always be honest about what it is.
That covers a link’s whole life. The next step up is making one link behave differently for different people - sending some visitors one way and others another - which is what routing rules are for.
Manage your links