Ambergate
DocSend-like sharing for Figma, Google Slides, and PDFs with email capture, analytics, and custom domains.
Share presentations behind an email or password gate. PDF uploads with page-by-page viewing, analytics on views, unique visitors, time spent, and pages viewed. Magic-link auth for creators, Vercel-API-driven custom domain provisioning, and native OS sharing for recipients.
What I was solving
It started with a small annoyance: I wanted to embed a Figma deck on a page and realized there wasn’t a good way to do it. The Figma embed is clunky, the Google Slides one is uglier, and PDFs lose interactivity entirely. So I built the embed I wanted. Then I looked at DocSend — the obvious “real” answer for sharing decks with gating and analytics — and bounced off how heavy it was. Too many features, priced for sales teams, made simple for nobody. I wanted the opposite: a tool an indie operator could use in two clicks to put a gated deck behind a link.
How I built it
I started by narrowing the problem hard: not “a DocSend alternative,” just “a way to put a Figma deck behind an email or password and watch what happens to it.” Everything else got cut. From there I worked with Claude Code to draft a plan — data model, screens, auth flow, hosting — and iterated on it until the plan felt right end-to-end before any code got written. Then I built it the same way: small steps, plan-first, review-and-adjust, repeat.
Once the core was working I stopped thinking like the builder and started using the app as a real user — uploading my own decks, sharing them with people I actually wanted to share with, setting up custom domains, watching the analytics from the other side. Every rough edge surfaced that way got smoothed over before adding anything new. Most of the product polish came from that pass, not from the original plan.
What happened
Live as Ambergate.app (rebranded from the earlier “Gated Slides” working name). Used by a handful of operators today; the goal isn’t a unicorn, it’s a tool I’d happily pay $5 a month for and that other operators do too. Roadmap is small and opinionated: better presence (“X is on slide 4 now”), Figma + Google Slides ingest beyond PDF, and team-of-one billing.