Publish your app with one click, and start your scope from a PRD

An idea is easier to judge once other people can open it. For a founder, the distance between a finished build and a link you can send to a customer, an investor or a developer you are about to hire is the distance between a private experiment and a conversation. The same is true of the work you have already done. If you have written a requirements document, retyping it into a form is wasted effort and a chance to lose detail.

Hiring has the same friction in the other direction. Most platforms assume the client always makes the first move. In practice a freelancer often knows how they would do a job and would like to say so. This release shortens all three distances: from build to link, from document to scope, and from talent to contract.

Publishing a finished build

When a build has completed, a Publish button appears on the build screen. Select it and your app goes live at its own address on demo.afren.ai. Use View Published Site to open it, and share the link with anyone. The address is derived once for your project and kept. Publish again after a change and the same address updates to your latest build, so links you have already shared keep working.

A few things a careful user will want to know.

• What publishing needs. An active Pro or Team plan, or a build credit for that project. If you have neither, the message says so rather than failing quietly. Options are on the pricing page.
• What it publishes. The same app you see in the preview, including its sample data. Anyone with the link can open it, so treat the link accordingly.
• What it is not. Publishing is hosted by Afren and is instant. It is different from deploying the code to your own cloud account, where you connect your own backend and data.
• Taking it down. You are responsible for what you publish, and published sites follow our Terms and copyright policy. To take a site down, email business@afren.ai.

The trade-off is between convenience and control. A permanent address that updates in place is convenient, because nobody has to be sent a new link after every change. It also means that a published page is public the moment you publish. We chose the permanent address because a link that changes with every update is a link that nobody can safely share.

Starting a scope from a requirements document

You can now attach a PRD to your scope. A PRD is a product requirements document: the written statement of what a product should do. Upload a PDF, a plain text file or a Markdown file, and Afren reads the text and uses it to start your scope. The plan then begins from your own words rather than from a blank box.

Some behaviours to expect. The document is converted to text, so the layout and images of a PDF are not carried across, only its words. Very long documents are trimmed to a fixed length, so the most useful thing to put near the top is the summary of what you are building. The text goes in as the starting point, and you still review and adjust the scope before you confirm it. Nothing is final until you say so.

Why start from a document at all? Because the first scoping step is where misunderstandings are cheapest to fix and most expensive to miss. A scope built from what you have already written is closer to what you meant than one rebuilt from a sentence you typed in a hurry.

Contract proposals from talent

Talent can now send a contract proposal directly to a client. The proposal sets out a title, a description, an amount, a due date, terms and, if the talent wishes, milestones. It appears in the client's contracts, where the client can review it and accept it.

The mechanics follow the same rules as every other contract on Afren.

• The proposal starts as pending, and the talent's acceptance is recorded with their name, the time and their timezone.
• Deadlines are anchored to the end of the talent's own day, in their timezone, because they are the party who delivers.
• Before the client can accept, the client funds escrow, so the money for the work is secured before it begins. Escrow works per milestone, and you can read the full model in the documentation.
• The client receives an in-app notification and an email telling them a proposal has arrived.

This gives you a way to engage people who find your project and already know how they would do the work, without first inviting them. The control stays with the client: nothing is binding until the client accepts and escrow is funded.

Smaller improvements

• Profile photo crop. Choose a photo, then pan and zoom to frame the square that appears as your avatar. The photo is uploaded when you save the framing, so what people see is what you chose.
• Profile strength and assessment timer. Your profile strength updates as you add work experience and complete assessments, and a live countdown shows while you take a skill assessment.
• Maintenance page. If we pause Afren briefly, you see a clear branded page that explains what is happening. It makes no calls to the platform itself, so it loads even when the platform is paused, and it checks again on its own until we are back.
• Team chat history. Project chat messages are saved before they are delivered, so when you reconnect after a dropped connection they are still in the conversation.

What this means for you

You can put a build in front of someone with one click and keep the link the same as the app improves. You can start from the document you already have, and you can be approached by talent who know how they would do the work. Every step keeps a person in charge of what becomes public and what becomes binding.