How We Built Gift Links

TL;DR: We’re announcing gift links, which let paid and All Access Every members share paywalled articles with anyone. Using Codex and the latest frontier models, senior editor Jack Cheng took on the project himself. The process showed us that people across Every can now build and test ideas without taking engineers away from more important work.—Kate Lee

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Last month, we rolled out gift links on the Every website. If you have a paid or All Access membership, you can now share paywalled articles with people who aren’t Every members. Standard paid members can share five gift links each month, with the count resetting on the first of the month. All Access members can, starting today, share unlimited gift links.

Gift links by themselves aren’t novel. You’ve likely interacted with them in articles in the online editions of the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, or the New York Times. But those publications also have product teams larger than our entire company of 30 people.

Many of us at Every are veterans of organizations structured to dampen risk and dodge uncertainty, often at the cost of experimentation. We’re learning to explore new workflows, cede control to AI agents when it makes sense, and embrace the fact that good ideas can come from anyone—and now be built by anyone.

The path our small editorial team charted to ship the new gift links feature is a case study in how AI tools can turn a heavy organizational lift into a feasible experiment, and how an AI-native company decides what to build.

Here’s how we did it.

Scratching my own itch

As a senior editor at Every, I’ve edited dozens of pieces by our team and outside contributors, as well as written my own essays on creativity, taste, and maintenance. I’m proud of our work. I regularly share links to it in my personal newsletter.

When I share articles from other paid publications, though, I usually use gift links. Some of my favorite blogs, like Metafilter or Jason Kottke’s, tend to share paywalled articles as gift links as well. As much as I wanted gift links for myself, I saw a business case for them. Were we limiting Every’s reach and potential for virality by not giving people a way to share paywalled content?

To find out, I started digging.

I first searched Every’s Slack and Discord channels to see if anyone had raised the idea before. Maybe we’d even tried gift links in the past, or the feature had been proposed and declined for reasons I hadn’t considered. My search turned up a message from Kate Lee, Every’s editor in chief, also wondering about gift links. Each article in our system had a preview link that bypassed the paywall, but the feature was more meant for sharing drafts internally.

Kate and I have a weekly check-in, so I brought up the idea then. She said that whenever she shares articles with the rest of the team in Slack, she uses gift links too.

Given that gift links could bring new readers to our site, I knew that Austin Tedesco, Every’s head of growth, would be an important stakeholder. I sent him a feeler message.

Austin’s response was unenthusiastic. As he said candidly in our video about building gift links, “interesting” was his way of telling me, “Don’t waste my time with this.”

But it also wasn’t a no. At most other companies—even at the company Every was one year ago—I might’ve left it there. The additional time and effort needed to sell the idea to Austin and other stakeholders, and convince the rest of the organization that it was worth diverting our website’s engineering lead Andrey Galko from more pressing engineering projects—all while pulling focus from my own duties editing, writing, and building much-needed tools to improve our editorial workflow—wouldn’t have merited the reward. Pursuing my gift links idea would have been the path of most resistance.

Luckily, it’s not one year ago.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

• How a lightly technical editor used AI agents to research, pitch, and ship a software feature solo
• Why Every’s head of growth greenlit a feature he didn’t think was a priority
• How AI-native organizations trade resource protection for experimentation