Upgrades Are Live — for the People Who Own the Pieces, and the People Who Make Them

A week ago I wrote that CraftedLink was here. Today the last piece slid into place: the money part works, on both sides. If you own a piece with a tag in it, you can give its page more room right from your phone. If you make things and set these tags in them, you can join a plan, get your credit, and sell upgrades to your own customers. I tested every step of it myself this afternoon with a real card, so this isn't a promise about next week. It's on.

If you hold the piece

Tap the tag the way you always have. Under the story there's a quiet line: Upgrade your page now. Tap it and the page shows you what it can become — Snapshot, Story, or Together, each described in a sentence, plus Link if all you want is for the tag to open an address of your choosing. Pick one, and you're on a Stripe payment page. I want to be exact about that: the card fields are Stripe's, on Stripe's page, and never on craftedlink.app. My site never sees your card.

Within a minute of paying, two things happen. The page itself moves up — nothing already on it changes or disappears. And an email lands with your setup link, the door you use to add photos, words, a voice recording, whatever the size you picked allows. The link works for a year. After that, or whenever you like, you can add an email and password to the page and never need the link again.

One more thing, and it's one I felt strongly about: moving up later costs only the difference. If your piece came with a Snapshot page and a year from now you want a Story page, you pay the gap between the two, not the whole second price. Once a page has a keeper, the "buy now" button also steps out of the way for whoever else taps it; the page shows a small "Need more room for your story?" line instead, and that goes to the maker, who sorts it out with you. Nobody gets to pay their way into a page that's already yours.

If you make the pieces

The maker side opened today too, and it's built around one idea: the page belongs to your customer, but the relationship belongs to you.

• Starter costs nothing. Set tags in your work, every piece gets its included Crafted page with your name and your care notes, and when a customer wants more they ask you from the page and you approve it with one click.
• Studio and Signature are the plans, monthly or annual, your choice. Here's the part I'm proudest of: the whole plan fee comes back to you as CraftedLink credit, automatically, the moment the payment clears. You're not paying for a seat. You're prepaying for the upgrades you'll hand your customers, at wholesale rates that get better with the plan.
• Top up whenever you want. Ran low before a busy market weekend? Add credit from your dashboard and it's in your balance before you've closed the tab.
• Your name on everything. The insert card that goes in the box carries your logo and, if you like, your picture; every paragraph on it is yours to reword. The "About this piece" block on the page says who made it and how to reach you.
• A link to your store, from here. Once you've put five CraftedLink tags out into the world, we add a link to your store on craftedlink.app. People who land here looking at what these pages can do should be able to find the people who make the pieces.

The current plan prices and what each one includes are spelled out in the maker terms, in a table, in plain words. Joining is still by arrangement for now, which is the honest way to say I want to talk with each maker before I hand them the keys. Write to me and we'll set you up.

What else changed in a week

Launch week is when you find out what you forgot. A few things landed because someone tapped a real tag and told me what was missing:

• Every page now has a Contact the maker link, and a "Can't reach them? Tell us" route to me behind it. If a maker doesn't answer you within three days, I'm told; you never wait longer than seven days for a human answer. That's in the terms now, not just in my head.
• The address every tag points at, craftedlink.app, is registered and paid through August 2, 2036, which is the longest term the internet's registry allows anyone to buy. You don't have to take my word for it; the guarantee page tells you how to check it yourself in about thirty seconds.
• The insert cards print with the maker's own wording, the QR is a touch smaller, and the text a touch larger, because I printed a batch and squinted.

Not everything is finished, and I'd rather say so here than let you find out. The Together page's family-voices features are still arriving piece by piece; today it's a Story page with far more room. Makers on a plan can connect their own Stripe so customer upgrades run through their account directly; that's something we set up together when you join at that level, not a switch you flip alone. And the "save an offline copy" button on every page is still the real backstop for all of it, because a business promise and a file on your own drive are different kinds of safe.

If you've got one of my trays, tap it tonight and see what it can become. If you make things, come talk to me. Either way: every crafted piece has a story, a reason, a purpose. Now it can be shared, and now the person who owns it can make it theirs.

— Jennifer