Your client opens the link. That is the whole flow.

The link is the credential

The reason most sharing tools demand a viewer account is that their URLs are guessable, so the login is doing the security. Flip that and the account becomes unnecessary. A Stacktree page lives at a token URL with roughly 128 bits of entropy. It is never listed on any index page, never enumerated, never in a sitemap, and every response carries crawler-blocking headers, so search engines and AI crawlers do not surface it. The only people who can open the page are the people you gave the link to. That is the same trust model as an unlisted video or a calendar invite, applied to a full rendered web page, and it is why the viewer side can be so plain: click, read.

This is the model in full on private HTML hosting. The rest of this page is about what you add when the link alone is not enough.

Three gates, none of them an account

Links travel. A client forwards the thread, pastes the URL into Slack, opens it on a borrowed laptop. When that matters, you add a gate, and the important property of each gate is what it asks of the viewer:

• A passcode. You set a shared secret; the client types it once and their browser holds the grant. The prompt is a plain styled page, not the browser's credential dialog, and the passcode is stored hashed, never in plaintext. Passcodes work on every plan, including all three free-plan pages. See password-protecting a page.
• An email-domain gate. You name the client's domain, say acme.com. A viewer enters their work address, gets a magic link, and clicks it. That proves control of a mailbox at the client, which is stronger than a secret that can be pasted into a chat, and still creates no account: no password exists, so there is nothing to reset or remember. From Solo at $19 a month.
• A per-recipient share link. Mint each stakeholder their own labelled link on top of the same page. Each one records its own opens, can carry its own expiry and open cap, and can be revoked alone if one thread leaks. Free on every plan.

Underneath any of these you can set an expiry, or burn-after-read for a page that deletes itself after the first open. Access ends when you decide, which is the part an emailed attachment can never give back.

What the other tools ask of your client

It is worth being precise about the alternatives, because they are all reasonable products solving a different problem.

DocSend fronts documents with an email wall: the viewer enters an address, and the sender can require a verification code before the document renders. That is the product working as designed, because DocSend is built for pitching, where capturing the prospect's identity is the point. When the viewer is a client who already pays you, the wall reads differently. The full comparison is on the DocSend alternative page.

Portal software gives each client a real account: an invitation to accept, a password to create, sometimes a seat to pay for. If files flow both directions and signatures or invoices live in the same place, that overhead buys something, and we say so plainly on the secure client portal page. If the flow is you delivering finished work outward, it mostly buys a login screen your client will not use.

Shared drives skip the new account but inherit the old one: the client hits a permission request, or the wrong-Google-account dance, or a folder view that makes your finished report look like a file among files.

What the client actually experiences

1. They click the link in your email, on any device.
2. If you gated it: they type the passcode, or enter their work email and click the magic link that arrives. Once, not per visit; the grant lasts 30 days.
3. The page renders. Charts stay interactive, nothing downloads, and nothing asks them to sign up for anything.

When you revise the work, the page updates in place and the same URL stays current, so the link in their inbox never goes stale. If you deliver to the same client repeatedly, a client space collects everything at one address of yours, acme.youragency.com, behind one inherited gate the client passes once. And if the work is AI-produced, the delivery flow is identical; how agencies share AI-generated work covers that end to end.

What it costs you (the client always pays nothing)

Viewers are free on every plan, always: clients are never seats, and nine viewers cost the same as one. On your side, Free is $0 for three pages, each expiring after seven days, passcodes included. Solo at $19 a month makes pages permanent and adds email-domain gates, one custom domain, one client space, and viewer counts. Studio at $79 covers ten of each and adds engagement analytics. The full table is on pricing.