Timed links — go live, expire, recur, without manual switchovers

A friend who runs a fashion drops account once admitted to me that her actual launch-morning routine involved waking up at 5:55am to manually swap the link on her bio at 6:00am sharp. Every drop. Every Friday. For two years. She told me this on a Sunday over coffee like it was a normal thing.

It is not a normal thing. Timed links exist because nobody should have to set an alarm for the privilege of running their own business. You set the activation time and the expiry, days or weeks in advance, and the link page rotates itself.

How it actually works

Every link on your page can take a `goLiveAt` and `expiresAt`. Until the activation timestamp, the link is dormant — it exists in your editor but doesn't render on the public page. At activation, it appears. At expiry, it disappears. No re-publish, no cache pause, no 'is this live yet' refresh-spam on your phone.

Use it for the drop, the event, the deadline, the sale

Four high-leverage uses, in rough order of how often we see them in production:

1. 1Launch days. Pre-stage your launch link the night before with a `goLiveAt` of your announce time. You sleep in. The link appears on schedule.
2. 2Limited-time offers. 24-hour discount? Set both `goLiveAt` and `expiresAt`. The link is gone the moment the deal ends — no embarrassing 'sorry, sold out, but this old code still works' edge case.
3. 3Event countdowns. Pair a timed link with a countdown widget. The link goes live the moment the countdown hits zero.
4. 4Seasonal switches. Stage your holiday hero now. Set `goLiveAt` to December 1, `expiresAt` to January 5. The link appears and disappears without you opening the app.

What 'time' actually means here

All schedule timestamps are stored in your account's primary timezone, which you set in settings. So '9am' on a New York account means 9am Eastern, even if you happen to be on a plane in Madrid when you set it. We display the timestamp in your local time in the editor but evaluate it in your account timezone at runtime.

Daylight saving transitions are handled correctly — a recurring 'every Friday 7pm' will continue to fire at 7pm local time across the DST boundary, not at 6pm or 8pm. We've had real customers care about this so we built it right.

How it pairs with day-and-time rules

Timed links handle one-off windows. Day-and-time rules handle recurring patterns — 'show this link only on weekends', 'show this only on the first of each month', 'show this only between 5pm and 10pm London time'. The two systems compose: a link can have both a `goLiveAt`/`expiresAt` *and* a recurring rule that further restricts when it shows.

For example: a podcast that releases on Mondays might use a recurring 'show only on Mondays from 9am to 9pm' rule for their latest-episode hero link, layered under a one-off launch window for a special crossover episode.

Edge cases we handled so you don't have to

• Scheduled link goes live mid-A/B test? The A/B test inherits the schedule — both variants appear or disappear in lockstep.
• Scheduled link expires while someone is mid-click? The redirect still resolves to the original destination. We don't bait-and-switch on a click that's already in flight.
• Scheduled link points to a Stripe checkout that's closed for the campaign? Stripe returns a clean 'session not found' page. We don't dispatch the redirect if the destination was clearly meant to be paused.
• Two scheduled links want the same hero slot? You set priority. Higher priority wins for that window.

Try it for your next launch

If you have a launch within the next 14 days, here's the highest-leverage 5 minutes you can spend today: open your Linkstacked editor, add a placeholder hero link, set its `goLiveAt` to your launch time, save. Now go to sleep on the night before launch knowing the link page handles itself.