Every team we talked to in beta asked the same question first: “can I send this to my client without making them sign up?” Not folders. Not real-time. Not even AI. The first question was about share friction.
Read-only links handle it. You click Share, you copy the URL, you paste it in an email. The recipient clicks. They see the document. They don’t see a login wall, they don’t see an “anonymous user can view” banner, they don’t see a Google account picker. They see your writing, rendered.
We ship the feature free, on every plan, with no view caps. The economics are simple: a doc that gets shared is a doc that gets read, and a doc that gets read is the only ad we have. The free tier eats the bandwidth. The free tier brings the writers.
Notion gates this behind a “Plus” plan. Google Docs assumes the recipient has a Google account. The boring feature, the one nobody markets, is the one that closes deals.