Guide · Expiring links

How to make a share link that expires on its own

The problem with a share link isn't creating it — it's remembering to kill it. You send a report to a client, the project ends, and six months later that link is still live, still public, still one forward away from someone who shouldn't have it. Here's how to publish a link that retires itself.

When you publish a document with freo.cloud, you can give it an expiry so the link retires itself. A hard expiry date (expires_at) makes the link stop working after a set moment; inactivity dormancy (auto_private_after_days) turns a link nobody opens private on its own and emails you, and one click brings it back with its original sharing intact. You choose either when publishing, or leave a document to stay live indefinitely.

On a chat app like Claude.ai or ChatGPT instead of a coding agent? Connect the MCP server with one-click OAuth (no token) — then the same "just ask it to publish" flow applies.

How to set it

You don't dig through a settings panel for this. Because freo is built for publishing straight from an AI agent, you say it in plain language and the agent maps it to the right field when it publishes:

• →"Publish this, but make it expire in 7 days" → the agent sets expires_at to a week out.
• →"Share this dashboard, and let it go private if nobody looks at it for a month" → the agent sets auto_private_after_days.
• →"Put this up and keep it live — it shouldn't ever auto-retire" → the agent turns dormancy off, no expiry date.

Under the hood these are just two values on the document — expires_at and auto_private_after_days — so if you'd rather set them by hand, or adjust them after publishing, you can do that from the dashboard too. There's nothing to install and nothing to schedule yourself; the expiry travels with the document.

What the viewer sees when it expires

A link that dies badly looks like your mistake. When a freo link has expired, the viewer doesn't get a broken page, a server error, or a confusing redirect — they get a clean, plain "this link has expired" page. The document itself is never exposed; the request is turned away before any content is served. Technically it's a 410 Gone, which is the honest answer to "this used to exist and deliberately doesn't any more" — but the person on the other end just sees a tidy message that tells them what happened, not a dead end that makes them wonder if you sent the wrong URL.

The same applies when a link goes dormant from inactivity: it stops serving the document and behaves as private, rather than leaving stale content sitting there for anyone who kept the old address.

Bringing a link back

Dormancy is meant to be reversible, because "I forgot about it" shouldn't cost you the setup work. When a link goes dormant, the email you get has a "Make live again" action. One click and the document is public again — and crucially, it comes back with the exact sharing it had before. If it was a named allowlist, it's the same allowlist. If it was email-protected, it's still email-protected. You're not rebuilding access from scratch or accidentally making something public that used to be locked down.

This pairs neatly with access control: the access level and the expiry are two separate dials on the same document, so a link can be both restricted and time-limited, and restoring one never quietly changes the other. A hard expiry, by contrast, is intended to be final — if you want that document back, you republish it, which keeps "this deadline has passed" meaning exactly that.

When to use which

• →Reach for a hard expiry when there's a real deadline: a time-limited offer, a preview tied to a meeting, a sensitive document you only want reachable for a fixed window.
• →Rely on dormancy for the everyday stuff you share and forget — client reports, one-off dashboards, drafts — where you don't have a date in mind but you'd rather it didn't stay exposed forever.
• →Turn both off for things you genuinely want permanently online: a public write-up, a portfolio piece, documentation you'll keep pointing people at.

A sensible habit is to leave dormancy on as a default safety net and add a hard expiry only when a deadline actually exists. That way nothing you share lingers by accident, but you're never surprised by a link disappearing before its work is done. If you're curious which links are getting opened at all, view tracking tells you — and a link with no opens for weeks is exactly the kind dormancy is there to tidy up.

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