Alternatives
The tools people find when they search for a Linkvertise or AdFly alternative are not the same product in different colours. They differ in what the visitor has to do, in who gets paid, and in whether the page a visitor lands on is yours or theirs. Here is the honest version of that difference, with a page per tool for the detail.
| Tool | What the visitor does | Where you get paid | Where access lives |
|---|---|---|---|
| UnlockHub | Completes a sponsored offer, or pays you. | An offer payout, or your own price through Stripe. | Your page, on your domain, plus a Discord role if you want one. |
| Linkvertise | Works through a wall of ad steps, or buys Linkvertise PREMIUM to skip it. | A performance-based share of ad revenue. PREMIUM money is Linkvertise's own subscription. | A destination link, off-platform. |
| AdFly | Nothing today: adf.ly redirects to Linkvertise. | Nothing today. While it ran, revenue per view, with a $5 payout minimum. | Nothing today; historically a destination link. |
| Sub2Unlock | Subscribes, follows or joins a channel before the link appears. | Nothing to the publisher: the tool is funded by its own ads, not by a payout. | A destination link, revealed after each action is confirmed. |
| Lootlinks | Completes a sponsored task from an offerwall, or joins a Discord server. | A payout per completed offer, on a Net+30 schedule and with a published fee list. | A destination link, off-platform. |
| Work.ink | Works through ad steps or tasks before the link appears. | Revenue per completed step, at a CPM the vendor markets but does not publish a table for. | A destination link, off-platform. |
| Lockr | Completes a task, or buys Lockr PREMIUM to skip the gate. | Task payouts, plus a share of PREMIUM revenue that Lockr does not publish a split for. | A link or a file behind the gate, off-platform. |
| Upgrade.Chat | Pays for a role or a membership, and the bot grants it. | Membership revenue, deposited into your own Stripe or PayPal account when the customer pays. | A role on the Discord server. |
Rates, plans and payout rules change without notice, so none of the figures are copied here. Check each tool's own terms before you commit traffic to it. If something on this page is out of date, tell us on the contact page and it gets fixed.
A content locker for links rather than a plain shortener: the visitor works through a wall of ad steps, or buys Linkvertise's own PREMIUM subscription to skip them, and only then does the file appear. It pays per action, into a pooled revenue share, on its own schedule.
AdFly shut down in May 2023. Linkvertise bought it, migrated the accounts, and adf.ly has redirected to linkvertise.com since. Any list that still offers AdFly as an option is out of date, and the only useful question left is what to use instead.
A social gate rather than a money gate: the visitor subscribes, follows or joins a channel, and the link appears once the platform confirms it. It is free to use because nobody is paying you for the unlock: Sub2Unlock monetises the gate itself with its own ads.
An offer locker for gaming content: the visitor picks a task from an ad or offer tier, completes it, and LootLabs pays for the completion. The brand is now LootLabs and lives at lootlabs.gg, and the old lootlinks.com domain is parked, so most of the guides written about it describe a site that no longer exists. The money is real; it depends on the offers available to that visitor's country and device, and there is no price a visitor can pay instead.
A shortener with tasks layered on it: shorten a link, optionally require an action, and get paid per completion. Work.ink's own site sits behind a bot challenge, so its published numbers could not be read directly; vendor copy reproduced elsewhere advertises CPMs of $10 to $40 and up to $90 per thousand clicks, with payouts by PayPal or bank transfer.
A content locker for download links, run by Gaea Operations: the visitor completes a task, or buys the Lockr PREMIUM subscription to skip the gate. It is the closest like-for-like on this list, which is why the differences that matter are about money and delivery rather than layout.
A Discord membership platform rather than a locker: connect Stripe or PayPal, define plans, and the bot grants and manages the roles. Free to start, and it gates channels by role; serving your own files is a higher plan.
It depends on what you are gating, not on which tool is best in the abstract. If you want revenue per click on traffic you already have, an ad-funded shortener is the direct substitute. If you want to sell access and keep the payment, you need a tool where the visitor pays you rather than passing an ad page, which is what UnlockHub does with Stripe on your own account.
Ad-based shorteners pay per view or per click; offer lockers pay per completed task; membership platforms pay out what the member was charged, minus their cut. The first two also depend on the visitor's country, because advertisers bid differently by region.
Most charge nothing up front and take a share of what is earned instead. UnlockHub takes 25% of each payout and nothing from earnings, so a project that makes nothing costs nothing.
Yes, and that is what the alternative lists rarely cover properly. A role with an expiry can be granted on unlock and swapped out when the period ends, so paying for access and losing access are the same mechanism working in opposite directions.
The link shorteners cannot: the page you send people to is theirs. UnlockHub serves each gateway from a portal domain, and a domain you own can be attached to it, so the address a visitor sees is yours.
No. A project is a page UnlockHub serves for you, including the address it sits on, so a file, a download or a Discord server all work without a site of your own.
Create a portal, put it in front of the thing worth paying for, and see the whole flow before you decide anything. Nothing is charged until a visitor unlocks.