See who opens your documents, without a per-seat subscription

DocSend spent years as the default because it had a usable free tier: a handful of tracked documents, no card. That tier no longer exists. New users get a 14-day trial of the Advanced plan and then choose a paid plan, starting at $15 per user per month ($10 billed annually) for Personal, with Standard several times that. For a fundraising founder sending one deck, or a freelancer sending four proposals a quarter, that is a subscription priced for a sales team attached to a job that happens a few times a year. Link in Seconds starts free and stays free within its limits, no trial clock, no card, no seat count.

This is the friction DocSend charges you to introduce. A DocSend link commonly asks the viewer for an email address before the document opens, that's how it attributes an open to a person. It works, and it costs you opens: an investor skimming twenty decks, or a client opening a quote on their phone between meetings, sometimes just closes the tab. A Link in Seconds link opens the document immediately in the browser. If you do want to know who specifically is reading, every plan has an optional email gate you can switch on per link, the difference is that it's your choice per document, not the default on every one.

This used to be DocSend's clearest edge, and it isn't any more. On any plan, Link in Seconds shows how long readers spent on each page of a deck, how far they got and the page after which most of them stopped, so you can see that an investor stalled on slide 11. Each visit has its own page-by-page breakdown with device, city and how they arrived, and repeat visits are grouped by visitor. On Free you see opens over time and unique visitors. Where DocSend still goes further is the workflow around the document: data rooms behind an NDA click-through, e-signature and a team content library. If you want to know whether the proposal was read and where interest dropped, you don't need a per-seat subscription to find out.

The control set is where the two overlap most. You can put a password on a link, hide the download button so a document is read rather than kept, set an expiry date on a time-limited quote, and cap how many times a link can be opened. We're honest about the ceiling: view-only deters casual saving but cannot stop a screenshot, and there is no DRM here, no tool short of a managed viewer truly prevents a determined copy. What it does do is make a document unmistakably look-don't-keep, which is what a draft or a pre-signature contract usually needs.

Fundraising means version churn, v4 on Tuesday, v5 after the Thursday call. Replace the file behind a Link in Seconds link and the same URL serves the new document, so nobody holding the old link is reading a stale deck, and you don't have to email around a correction. The view history stays attached to the link, so you can see who opened it before and after the update.

DocSend is priced and positioned around fundraising, but most of the documents people want tracked are smaller than that: an invoice you'd like to know was seen, a contract sitting in someone's inbox, a resume you sent to nine companies, a scope of work waiting on sign-off. Each is the same shape of problem, you sent a PDF and went quiet. Because a tracked link here costs nothing to create, it's worth using on all of them rather than rationing a seat licence for the two documents a year that seem to justify it.

An honest comparison has to name this. DocSend's virtual data rooms, NDA gating, Dropbox Sign integration and team-level content management are real products that this is not. If you are running a diligence process with a data room, gating documents behind an NDA click-through, or managing a shared content library across a sales team, DocSend is built for that and Link in Seconds is not. The overlap is the common case, one document, sent to someone, and you want to know it was opened and control what they can do with it.

On any plan you can set a custom slug so the URL reads like a document you meant to send rather than a random string, and serve it from your own domain or subdomain with automatic SSL. For a proposal that lands in a client's inbox next to your name, that matters more than it sounds, the delivery reads as yours end to end, and the same permanent URL can go in an email signature, a bio, or a printed QR code.