Best Tools to Share a PDF Link That Expires: 6 Compared (2026)

Three controls sit on every share link, on both plans: an expiry date, a maximum-views cap, and an off switch that deactivates the link immediately and reversibly. A past date is rejected on save rather than quietly creating a dead link, and the date stays editable, so extending a deadline is one edit and nothing needs re-sending.

It leads this list for the other half. When the link stops, the reading record stays: which pages rendered, how long each held attention, whether the reader came back. That record is kept for 365 days on the free plan and 730 on Pro, with every view kept rather than the last few, so a link that expired in March is still answerable in September. Automated opens are classified at session close and excluded from the counts — mail-security scanners that follow a link before the recipient sees it, chat and preview services fetching it to build a card — and the dashboard shows what the filter removed rather than silently shrinking the number. One honest asymmetry: the view cap is checked against a raw counter, so a scanner's fetch can spend one of the views you allowed.

PDFTrackr wins the job this page is about — the link stops on your terms and the record outlives it on a plan with no card. The free tier is 500MB, 50 files, 50 active share links and 50MB per file, and free PDF tracking is the product rather than a trial of it.

The expiry evidence here is unusually direct: the list of link controls Papermark's own help page publishes under a Free Plan heading includes an expiration date, transcribed rather than summarised:

“Receive email notification: Enable this to get notified by email each time your document is viewed. · [Link permission by pricing plan → 'Free Plan'] Require email to view · Receive email notification · Allow downloading · Expiration Date · Require password to view · Enable feedback from visitors”— Papermark's own link-settings help page, read from the raw page on 19 Sep 2026; the bracketed label is ours

Its genuine win over us is not the expiry: the core is open source (AGPLv3) and Self-hosting exists: free for personal, non-commercial use (no datarooms or advanced security features); teams and companies need a paid self-hosting licence; the pricing grid lists 'Self-hosted option' as Enterprise, where PDFTrackr offers no self-hosting at any price. Its free tier also takes PDF, Notion pages, images and spreadsheets, where we take PDFs only. The ceiling is the record, not the sending: analytics are kept for 30 days on free, and the view-history row reads up to 20 last views on that plan against up to 1,000 last views on the tier above. Paid starts at €29/month billed monthly (€24/month billed annually).

It ranks for this question while selling the inverse of it. Its published free plan is Free — €0: up to 3 GB/month, 10 transfers/month, transfer expiry up to 3 days; individual, non-commercial use only, and the feature grid's expiry row reads transfer expiry: Free up to 3 days · Starter up to 3 days · Ultimate unlimited — so the premium upgrade buys an expiry that never fires, plus the ability to recover an expired transfer. Password protection is available across the plans we read: password-protected transfers: yes on Free, Starter and Ultimate.

The sender does get reporting, and more than the category usually admits: yes, on all plans: the sender sees delivery/download status in the Transfers panel (per recipient, with a timestamp, for email transfers; a general 'downloaded' status for link transfers), and can switch on Access Control (Tracked downloads: downloader verifies their email, sender is notified on each download). What the pages we read do not describe is reading — no statement of per-page reading data or time-per-page appeared on the pages read; the tracking described is download status, not reading. That is the difference between a delivery receipt and a reading record: the right trade for a 3GB video, the wrong one for a twelve-page proposal. Paid starts at €8/month billed monthly (€7/month billed yearly), with €23/month billed monthly (€19/month billed yearly) for the tier carrying unlimited expiry.

Digify carries both halves. On the link side its compare grid ticks revoke access, file expiry and one-time sharing ticked on Pro, Team, Business and Enterprise. On the file side it publishes Persistent Protection After Download, and the tier bound matters as much as the capability: yes — Persistent Protection After Download (PPAD): access to an already-downloaded PPAD file can be revoked or set to expire, and printing/sharing blocked. Ticked on Team, Business and Enterprise; NOT ticked on Pro; Digify labels the row 'Preview'. So the cheapest published tier expires links and does not include the after-download control; that starts at $350/mo billed annually ($500 monthly).

The reading data is real rather than a delivery receipt — page-level reading data on every tier (Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise): views, detailed file analytics, location and IP. The price is the thing to settle first: none — trial only, with the cheapest published plan at $140/mo billed annually ($190 monthly). For a sender with one proposal a month that is a large number; for a firm circulating diligence material it is a different calculation, and this page will not pretend the capability is available anywhere cheaper.

The DRM answer, and the one whose own material is clearest about what it costs you. Its published position on revocation is precise: Revoke access regardless of where documents are located: revoke a document for all users instantly · revoke individual user access to single, multiple, or all documents · revoke access automatically after a number of views and/or prints … Apart from expiration on a set date, the other methods require an online license check before the user can open the document. … If you have set the license check to ‘never’ in Safeguard Writer, (offline access) then revocation cannot be implemented. It also logs printing — Print logging: how often a document was printed, when and where, and Document logs identify who viewed and/or printed a document, and when (Safeguard Enterprise only).

Two bounds travel with that. The first is in the vendor's own sentence: apart from expiring on a set date, the revocation methods need the document to check a licence online, so a document set for offline use cannot be pulled back. The second is reporting: No per-page reading data appeared in any Locklizard material we have read. You get enforcement and print logs, not the page-by-page reading a tracked link gives away free. We hold no published price for this vendor, so this page states none.

Tiiny Host publishes a PDF at a link in about a minute, and the free plan's published position is the opposite of expiry: free plan hosts links indefinitely (log in once every 3 months); 1 active project, 3 MB uploads (0.5 MB PDFs), 5,000 visits/mo, 5 GB bandwidth/mo, no analytics. There is no date field to set here because permanence is the product; the only thing that ends a free link is you deleting it or letting the account lapse.

The second thing to read is what the free plan records, which is nothing: paid upgrade, from the cheapest paid tier (Tiny) — "Built-in analytics"; "Link Tracking" only from Solo up; visit-level, not per-page, starting at €9/mo billed monthly (€5/mo billed yearly, €60/year). Visit-level counting answers how many, not who or how far, so a link up for a year leaves you a number rather than an account of what happened. For a permanent public URL to a brochure that is a fair trade; for a document with a deadline attached it is the wrong tool.