Your Stories Are Safe for 10 Years — Here's How

My own wood trays carry CraftedLink tags. Not as a demo — as the actual thing I sell out of my own shop. So before I ever asked another maker to trust this with their customers' stories, I had to trust it with mine.

That matters more than it sounds like. Someone puts a grandparent's voice recording behind a tap on a cutting board or a keepsake box. That's not a photo they can just re-upload if something goes wrong. It's irreplaceable. So this post is me walking through, plainly, what we actually promise — and what we don't.

The 10-year hosting guarantee. When a story page is activated, we commit to hosting it for ten years from that day. Not from when the item was bought, not from when the tag was made — from activation. A tag sitting unused in a drawer doesn't burn its clock. And this doesn't ride on anything staying subscribed: it isn't rented month to month, and it can't go dark because a subscription lapsed. If I add tags to a tray I sell you, that page's ten-year term is locked in the day it goes live — it doesn't depend on my shop staying open or my card staying on file. And the address those pages live at is already bought and paid for, not merely budgeted for: craftedlink.app is registered through the full ten years. Ten is the longest term anyone is allowed to register a domain for — so we bought the maximum that exists, up front.

What happens if CraftedLink itself ever closed. I'd rather answer this honestly than dodge it. If CraftedLink ever had to close, we commit to written notice to every customer we can reach, and to keeping the pages up for at least 30 days after that notice — enough time to hit that offline-copy button below and walk away with everything. That's not a forever promise — nobody can honestly make one of those about a web page — but it's a real, bounded one, and it's written down.

The offline backup. Every story page has a "Save an offline copy" button in its footer. It packs the whole page — photos, words, and audio — into a single file you keep. It opens on a phone, a computer, a USB drive, no internet connection and no CraftedLink account required. If the ten years are up, or if you just want your own copy sitting on your own hard drive tonight, that button is how you get it. I tell people to hit it once and forget about it.

Every piece also ships with a printed card carrying the page's address and code — so even if a phone can't tap the tag, the story is still reachable by hand.

Who can actually see a story page. By default, treat it as visible to anyone holding the physical piece — that's the whole point of tapping. But that's a setting, not a fixed rule. The owner can put a PIN on any page, and until it's entered the page shows nothing at all — not the photos, not the message, not the audio. The content genuinely stays on our server rather than being sent to the browser and hidden there, so there's nothing on the page to uncover by poking at it. Set it, change it, or take it off any time, free — who sees the story is completely in your control. A PIN keeps out passers-by rather than a determined attacker, so if a story is one you'd rather never sat on the web at all, build the page, hit "Save an offline copy", and keep it as a file you hand over yourself. Either way it's not searchable: story pages carry a noindex instruction by default, so a page won't turn up in a Google search for someone's name unless the owner deliberately turns that on. And tapping a tag never stores your IP address — not shortened, not hashed, never written down.

No app, no account, nothing to charge. That's not just a convenience line — it's the reason there's nothing for the person receiving the piece to get hacked or have abandoned. No login to lose, no app that stops getting updates, no account sitting somewhere waiting to be a liability.

Don't take our word on security — that link runs Mozilla's independent scanner on this site, live, and shows you the grade. I didn't write that grade. Mozilla did, and you can run it again yourself any time.

That's the whole promise: a real number of years, a written wind-down plan, a copy that's yours to keep, and nothing extra for anyone to lose sleep over.

If you make things with your hands and want to give your customers something like this, add CraftedLink to your products. And if you're buying a gift, look for the tag — it means the story that comes with it was built to last.