PayPal-owned Honey has been at the center of controversy over the past few weeks over claims the company can find you the best coupon codes. The tool allegedly secretly earns affiliate funds by changing the attributes of product links that creators post on their videos. The core of the problem is how affiliate links work and how when a user purchases, the money goes to the person who had the last link.

Former Vercel employee Steven Tey thinks his open source URL shortener and link tracking service Dub.co can solve this problem by eliminating the use of coupon codes and embedding them in links.

The company is building an attribution and affiliate product that creators can use to create their own links. Users will only receive the discount if they use that specific link.

“We want to make attribution more transparent for creators and businesses to avoid situations like the Honey scandal, where anyone can steal attribution,” Tey said in a phone interview with TechCrunch.

Tey created Dub.co as an open source URL shortener while working at Vercel. He added link tracking along the way. He built this project to better understand the products Vercel was shipping. Over time, Dub.co became a full-fledged SaaS service. Tey left Vercel at the end of 2023 and founded the company around the same time.

“There was a big problem with understanding where our revenue was coming from with attribution tracking. At Vercel at the time, we had no idea how our developer outreach, such as creating articles and tutorials, would translate into revenue. So that laid the foundation for Dub. seeds," Tey said.

He added that after launching Dub.co, he realized the affiliate space was outdated and confusing, without many customization tools. That's when he realized the link tracking space was more than just URL shortening services.

While the company's main revenue stream is businesses and businesses, it also offers a free plan for people to shorten links and track them. Notably, the startup is working with the Malaysian government, leveraging the open source portion of the project to build a link shortener and tracker for the authorities. Additionally, companies like Twilio use the SaaS hosted version of Dub.co, customized to their needs, to track their links, campaigns, and events. Additionally, YouTube channels such as Huberman Labs are using Dub's solution to track affiliates.

Dub.co launched a new product this week called Conversions, which tracks real-time marketing clicks that convert into signups or sales. The startup says this will help companies track granular metrics like customer acquisition costs, retention rates and lifetime value to better understand marketing returns. Dub.co can also integrate with tools like Shopify and Stripe to better track conversions.

Tey noted that while Dub.co offers artificial intelligence capabilities, it doesn't want them to take over the core product. Currently, users can use artificial intelligence to create custom reports or get title and description suggestions for different links. The startup also uses artificial intelligence to automatically tag links in existing categories.

Joseph Jacks, founder of OSS Capital, said that Dub.co has an advantage over the competition with its open source features, better user experience and design.

The company has raised $2 million from investors including OSS Capital; Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch; Balaji Srinivasan; design service Framer founders Jorn van Dijk and Koen Bok; former Facebook designer Soleio, an early supporter of Vercel, Perplexity, and Figma; and Cal.com CEO Peer Richardson.

“Links are the foundation of the web — combined with attribution, the addressable market is huge, at least tens of billions,” Jakes told TechCrunch via email.

“By turning short links into an attribution engine, Dub helps marketers answer the age-old question: ‘What is the ROI of my marketing spend?’ — backed by real-world conversion data.”