Is gated publishing the same as password protection?

No. Password protection uses a shared secret — anyone who knows the password can view the content, with no audit trail of who accessed what. Gated publishing uses identity-based authentication. Each viewer authenticates with their own company email. Access is tied to an identity, not a shared credential.

Does gated publishing work with any AI tool?

Yes. Display works with any tool that writes HTML to disk — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, or any other AI coding agent. You publish the output file; the tool that created it doesn't matter.

What happens if a viewer doesn't have a company email?

They can't access the artifact — which is the point. You can also grant access to specific external email addresses individually, or switch an artifact to public mode if you want anyone to see it.

Can I make a gated artifact public later?

Yes. Access control is per-artifact and changeable at any time. Set it to public and anyone with the URL can view it, no authentication required.

Is gated publishing GDPR/SOC 2 compliant?

Display does not store viewer identity beyond what's needed for authentication. Content is stored in your workspace and only accessible to authenticated viewers. Enterprise plan includes audit logs, SAML, and custom data residency. SOC 2 Type II certification is in progress.

What Is Gated Publishing?

The definition

Gated publishing has three components.

Publish: One action converts a local file into a permanent, shareable URL. No git repo. No deployment pipeline. No infrastructure to configure. The file lives at that URL until you take it down.

Gate: Access is controlled by company identity. Viewers authenticate with their Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account — the same one they use for email. If the email domain matches, they're in. If it doesn't, they're not.

Done: The viewer clicks the link, authenticates once in five seconds, and sees the full page — exactly as the author built it. No app to install. No account to create. No download prompt.

That's the whole model. Publish → gate → done.

The problem it solves

Internal content has no home.

AI tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf produce rich, interactive HTML daily — architecture proposals, competitive analyses, visual reports, Playwright test results, Jupyter exports. That content is built in minutes. Sharing it takes hours, or it doesn't happen at all.

The workarounds fall into three categories, and all of them fail.

Collaboration tools that can't render it

SharePoint, Confluence, Notion, and Google Drive were built for documents. HTML with inline JavaScript, CSS, and interactive charts is not a document — it's an application. These tools handle documents. They cannot handle applications.

SharePoint: Technically supports HTML hosting, but Microsoft has been restricting custom scripting since 2025. Renaming .html to .aspx and disabling DenyAddAndCustomizePages works today, barely, and less each quarter.
Confluence: The wiki editor strips JavaScript and CSS. Pasting an HTML artifact produces a broken skeleton of the original.
Google Drive: Stores the raw file. When someone clicks a shared link, they download presentation.html. It opens in a text editor. They see markup.
Notion: Cannot render arbitrary HTML. Notion Sites publishes Notion pages — not uploaded files.

Developer platforms that charge per-viewer or require GitHub accounts

The hosting platforms that can render HTML correctly charge enterprise prices for authentication.

Vercel: $300/month add-on for SSO on a single project. That's $300/month to share one HTML file with your team.
GitHub Pages (private repos): Requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud at $21/user/month. Every viewer — PM, VP, legal, designer — needs a GitHub account. 100 viewers: $2,100/month.
Cloudflare Pages + Access: $7/user/month after the first 50 users. For 100 viewers: $700/month. Plus 2–4 hours of setup.

DIY infrastructure nobody maintains

S3 + Cognito, GCP Cloud Run + IAP, Azure Static Web Apps. These work technically. They take 1–2 days to set up. They require ongoing maintenance — certificate renewals, access policy updates, infra upgrades. They belong to whoever set them up, and when that person leaves, they become an orphaned system that nobody understands and everyone is afraid to touch.

The result: Engineers screenshot their work or abandon it in the conversation. Content that took minutes to create gets shared as a flattened JPEG or dies entirely.

What changed — why this matters now

Three shifts made gated publishing necessary.

1. AI agents produce rich HTML by default.

Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf write self-contained, single-file HTML with all CSS and JavaScript inlined. This is the default output format. Claude Code reached $2.5B ARR in 8 months. 73% of developers use AI tools daily (Developer Survey 2026). The volume of AI-generated HTML inside companies is now large enough to constitute a workflow problem.

2. Interactive content doesn't paste.

A D3 chart doesn't paste into Confluence. An animated architecture diagram doesn't survive Google Docs. The richer the artifact, the harder it is to share through tools designed for plain text. Screenshots destroy the value. The sharing gap widens as the content gets better.

3. Viewers outnumber creators 10:1, making per-seat pricing structurally broken.

One engineer creates an artifact. Ten people need to see it — the PM, the VP, the security lead, the designer, two other engineers, the sales team. Per-seat pricing means the 11th viewer triggers incremental cost. Every viewer is a liability. Gated publishing inverts this: one workspace price, unlimited viewers, every time.

How gated publishing works

Author                              Viewers
  │                                    │
  ▼                                    │
dsp publish ./report.html          │
  │                                    │
  ▼                                    │
https://acme.dsp.so/q1-report ◄──── Click link
  │                                    │
  └──────────────────────────────────► Authenticate with @acme.com Google/Microsoft
                                       │
                                       ▼
                                    Full interactive page

Step 1 — Publish. Run dsp publish ./presentation.html from the terminal, or say "publish this to my team" in Claude Desktop, or drag and drop in the browser. A permanent URL is returned in under 15 seconds.

Step 2 — Share. Paste the URL in Slack, Notion, Jira, email — wherever. The URL works forever.

Step 3 — View. The viewer clicks the link. They're redirected to a login screen. They authenticate with their company Google or Microsoft email — one time, five seconds. They see the full page: interactive charts, animated diagrams, tabs, everything the author built.

No app to install. No account to create. No IT ticket to file. If they have a company email, they're in.

Gated publishing vs. public static hosting

Public static hosting (GitHub Pages free tier, Vercel, Netlify) serves content to anyone on the internet. No authentication. Anyone with the URL can view it.

This is the right model for open source documentation, public marketing sites, and anything meant to be public.

It's the wrong model for internal content. Architecture proposals, competitive analyses, financial reports, client presentations — these cannot live at a publicly accessible URL. "Security through obscurity" (a long, random URL that's technically public but hard to guess) doesn't satisfy compliance requirements and fails when someone forwards the link.

The distinction isn't technical — it's intentional. Gated publishing adds access control as a first-class feature. Public hosting doesn't have a gate. Gated publishing does, and you control whether it's open or closed.

File sharing (Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack uploads) sends the file to the viewer. The viewer downloads it. For PDFs, images, and Word documents, this is fine.

For HTML, it breaks. HTML with JavaScript and CSS is an application that must be served by a web server, not opened as a local file. A downloaded HTML file can't resolve relative paths, can't make API calls, and has no persistent URL to share further.

Gated publishing serves the rendered page at a permanent URL. The viewer never downloads anything. They see the page as it was built — with all the interactivity intact. The URL persists in Slack threads, Notion pages, and Jira tickets for months without breaking.

Gated publishing vs. documentation platforms

GitBook, Mintlify, Confluence, and Notion are documentation platforms. They have editors. They have structured content models. They maintain a tree of pages over time with collaborative authoring workflows.

This is a different job from gated publishing.

Gated publishing is format-agnostic and publish-first. You have a file. You need people to see it securely. You run one command. That's the entire workflow.

Documentation platforms require you to work in their authoring model — GitBook's editor, Confluence's wiki, Notion's blocks. They cannot host arbitrary HTML. GitBook charges $249/month for visitor authentication. Mintlify charges $250/month for password protection (not SSO).

Gated publishing does one thing: makes any HTML or Markdown file accessible at a permanent URL behind company auth. It's not trying to replace your documentation platform. It's doing the thing your documentation platform can't do.

Who needs gated publishing?

Engineering teams generating AI artifacts. Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf users who generate HTML output daily and need to share it with non-engineers. Every generated artifact is a potential use case.

QA teams sharing test reports. Playwright and Cypress produce HTML reports. These are internal documents — they contain test infrastructure details, failure screenshots, and timing data. They need to be accessible to the whole team (devs, PMs, QA leads) without requiring GitHub accounts.

Platform teams hosting internal tools. Swagger UI, Storybook, internal API docs — these belong behind company auth. They shouldn't require their own deployment pipeline or Vercel project.

Data teams sharing Jupyter exports. Plotly dashboards, Jupyter HTML exports, and data reports rendered as HTML need to reach stakeholders who have never opened a terminal.

Any team where the person creating content isn't the only person who needs to see it. Which is every team.

Getting started

Free tier at Display. Publish your first artifact in 15 seconds with one-time password authentication for viewers.

Teams plan ($49/month) adds Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 SSO — one-click authentication, no one-time passwords needed. Most teams upgrade within two weeks.

Publish your first artifact free →

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