The Problem: Links That Outlive Their Welcome
You send a pricing proposal to a prospect. They go dark. Six months later, that link is still live—and now your pricing has changed, your branding has evolved, or worse, that prospect forwarded it to a competitor who's quietly benchmarking you.
Shared content has a shelf life. Proposals become stale. Training materials get updated. Lead lists contain PII that shouldn't persist indefinitely. Yet most sharing tools treat links as permanent by default, leaving cleanup as a manual task that nobody remembers to do.
Auto-expiry solves this by making links ephemeral by design. Set a window, share the link, and HTMLvault handles the rest. When time's up, the content goes offline—no manual intervention, no forgotten links floating in the wild.
Who This Is For
Sales reps sharing time-sensitive proposals or pricing that shouldn't remain accessible after a deal closes or goes cold. Marketers distributing campaign assets or landing pages tied to specific promotions. RevOps teams circulating lead lists, territory assignments, or compensation documents that contain sensitive data. IT and security stakeholders who need assurance that shared content won't persist beyond policy-compliant retention windows.
If your organization has data retention policies—or if you've ever wished a shared link would just disappear when it's no longer needed—auto-expiry is the feature that makes it automatic.
How It Works
Every HTMLvault link has an expiry timestamp set at creation. When that timestamp passes, the link returns a clean expiration notice instead of rendering your content. This happens server-side—there's no client-side clock to manipulate, no cached content to worry about.
Free Tier: 7-Day Enforced Expiry
All Free tier links expire automatically after 7 days. This isn't configurable—it's a guardrail that ensures shared content doesn't persist indefinitely, even if you forget about it. For quick shares, one-off demos, or testing, 7 days is typically sufficient.
Pro Tier: Configurable Expiry Windows
Pro users set their own expiry window when creating a link. Options range from 1 hour to 1 year, or you can disable expiry entirely for content that genuinely needs to persist. The choice is yours—HTMLvault just enforces whatever you set.
What Happens When a Link Expires
Expired links don't throw a generic 404. Instead, viewers see a branded expiration page explaining that the content is no longer available. This page includes an option to request a fresh link—when clicked, HTMLvault emails the link owner with the request, including the viewer's email address if they provide it.
This flow keeps you in control. If a prospect reaches out because your proposal expired, you'll know they're still engaged—and you can decide whether to reshare current content or start a new conversation.
A Worked Example: Time-Boxed Pricing Proposal
A sales rep at a SaaS company generates a custom pricing proposal using Claude, exports it as HTML, and uploads it to HTMLvault. The deal has a 14-day decision window, so she sets expiry to 14 days.
The prospect receives the link, views it twice (she can see this in analytics), but doesn't respond. On day 15, the link expires. Three weeks later, the prospect comes back and clicks the link—but now sees the expiration notice. He clicks "Request Fresh Link," and the rep gets an email notification.
Now she has intel: the prospect is re-engaged after going dark. She can choose to send updated pricing (the original rates have changed) or use this as an opening to restart the conversation. Either way, she's not stuck defending a stale quote from a month ago.
Setting Expiry via API and Integrations
If you're creating links programmatically—through the REST API, Claude MCP, Zapier, or Clay—you can set expiry in the request payload. Pass expires_in as a duration (e.g., "7d", "24h", "1y") or expires_at as an ISO 8601 timestamp for precise control.
{
"html": "<html>...</html>",
"expires_in": "30d",
"password": "optional-password"
}Free tier API calls ignore custom expiry values and enforce 7 days. Pro API keys respect whatever you set.
Limits and Caveats
- Expiry is irreversible server-side. Once a link expires, the content is purged per HTMLvault's zero-data-retention policy. You can't "un-expire" a link—you'll need to create a new one.
- Cached content may briefly persist. If a viewer has your page open in a browser tab when it expires, they can still see it until they refresh. Expiry controls access to the server-hosted content, not what's already rendered client-side.
- Free tier cannot extend or disable expiry. 7 days is the maximum on Free. If you need longer windows or indefinite links, upgrade to Pro.
- Password protection and expiry are independent. A link can be both password-protected and time-limited. Expiry applies even to viewers who have the password.
Why This Matters
For the sales rep, auto-expiry means proposals don't become liabilities—they're time-boxed to the deal cycle and disappear when they're no longer relevant. For the marketer, it means campaign assets tied to specific promotions don't linger past their sell-by date. For RevOps and IT, it means data retention policies are enforced automatically, not dependent on someone remembering to delete old links.
Auto-expiry turns link hygiene from a manual chore into a system default. Set it once, share with confidence, and let HTMLvault handle the cleanup.