Public and Viewer Links
Survanta lets you share two kinds of link that work without a Survanta account:
- Public survey links — anyone with the link can answer your survey.
- Viewer links — anyone with the link can read results, and nothing more.
Both depend on your organization's subscription.
Public survey links
| Situation | What a visitor experiences |
|---|---|
| Subscription active | The link works according to how you configured it, and responses are collected |
| Subscription expired | The link reports that the survey is unavailable; the survey cannot be opened and no response can be submitted |
| After renewal | The same link works again, exactly as before |
Collection stops on expiry. A public link cannot keep gathering responses for an organization whose subscription has lapsed. Any submission attempted during that time is refused and nothing is saved.
Your links are never destroyed. Expiry does not revoke, delete, or invalidate a public link, and renewal does not replace it. There is no need to create a new link, re-generate a QR code, or re-send anything to your respondents. Whatever you distributed keeps working once you renew.
Viewer links
Viewer access is also subscription-gated. This is a deliberate policy choice: a viewer link is a capability you have shared outside your organization, and sharing it stops when your subscription does.
| Situation | What a viewer experiences |
|---|---|
| Subscription active | Results are readable |
| Subscription expired | Access is unavailable |
| After renewal | The same viewer link works again |
Viewer links are read-only at all times. There is no way to submit, edit, or change anything through a viewer link, whatever the subscription state. A viewer link also gives no dashboard access and shows nothing belonging to any other organization.
What your respondents are told
Nothing about your billing.
When a public link is unavailable, the visitor sees only a neutral message saying the survey link is unavailable. The response is deliberately identical to what an unknown or mistyped link produces, so that no outsider can tell whether the organization exists, whether the link was ever valid, or whether a payment is overdue.
A broken link is not the same as an expired subscription
These are two different situations and Survanta answers them differently on purpose.
| Situation | What it means | What the API returns |
|---|---|---|
| Invalid, mistyped, revoked, expired, or wrong-type link | An authentication problem — the credential itself is not usable | A generic refusal that reveals nothing about any organization |
| Valid link, but the organization's subscription has lapsed | The link is genuine; the service behind it is paused | A specific SubscriptionExpired result |
Only the second case can disclose subscription state, and reaching it already requires a genuine, still-valid link belonging to that organization. An unknown link never reveals anything.
For developers
Public and viewer link endpoints answer in JSON. They do not redirect a client to the dashboard sign-in page — a client on these surfaces can parse every response with its normal JSON handling and should never be sent an HTML sign-in form.
- Invalid credential of any kind: a generic unauthorized response, with no redirect.
- Valid credential, expired subscription: HTTP 403 carrying
errorCode 1001andcode "SubscriptionExpired". - The public status endpoint returns a neutral "unavailable" for an expired organization and for an unknown link alike.
See Mobile Subscription Contract for the full error contract, and the Access Links and Tokens section for how to create and manage these links.