Secret links (beta)
Secret links let you share a project privately without requiring viewers to sign in or create an Observable account.
Enabling a secret link generates a secret token for your project URL. Anyone with the secret in the URL can see your project, but it is not discoverable to the public, and you can change the secret or revoke access at any time.
Note
This feature is in beta. It is free today, but we plan to charge $1 / day per viewer for it in the future (see below). We’d love to hear your feedback at support@observablehq.com.
To share a project by secret link:
- Click the gear icon on a project to go to a project’s details page.
- Click “Share” in the upper right.
- Under “Access”, next to “External”, select “Requires secret link (beta)”.
- Click “Save”. The project URL below the project title will now include a secret token.
You can replace the secret by re-opening the Share modal and clicking “replace secret”, or revoke access by changing the External access level to “No access”. Due to how our access cookies currently work, viewers who have already accessed your project may retain access for up to three hours.
![Screenshot of the Share modal with a secret link enabled](/documentation/assets/secret-links.CnYVRhJ-.png)
Pricing
During the beta, this feature is free, and we encourage you to use it. We plan to monitor its use and will start charging $1 / day / viewer once we see enough use of this feature to indicate that it is valuable to our users.
Note that a viewer in this context will be either an Observable user who is not in the workspace, or a unique device (if the user is not signed into Observable). The viewer will be able to access any number of secret links in the workspace for a full day. We won't charge per click, or per session. This will allow such a viewer to explore the shared projects at their own pace throughout the day.
We will not charge you retroactively, and we will send an announcement well in advance of the pricing taking effect.
Workspace permissions
Workspace owners can choose whether workspace members should be able to use secret links using the “Allow workspace editors to manage secret links” checkbox on the Permissions tab, which is checked by default.