I had the same problem with bit.ly but building my own wouldn’t that mean at some point it is going increase the development cost (money for server) to manage huge audience? If not, I’d implement one too.
It is indeed but integrating AdSense for revenue would manage that. Also this is a Hackathon version, an MVP, the actual product will have proper caching so it will be designed to operate on minimum resource usage to reduce infra costs.