Six Things on EdgeURL That Were Quietly Broken (and What We Just Fixed)
Six recent EdgeURL fixes that quietly affected real users: templates that refused to save, free-tier tabs locked out of features that were always free, AI chat bubble covering ticket buttons on mobile
EdgeURL is in public beta, and most weeks ship somewhere between two and ten user-invisible commits. Six things broke in user-visible ways recently. This is what each one was, what it did to people who hit it, and what changed.
1. Templates that refused to save
The design tab in the bio editor opened a Browse Templates picker for free-plan accounts. Eleven design templates. The preview updated cleanly on every one. The save flow rejected nine of them with a generic "upgrade to unlock" error.
The save logic was correct from a billing-rules standpoint and incoherent from a user standpoint. The nine rejected templates used custom fonts that the free plan was still gated on. Templates opened to free users in mid May, and the matching font check never came out with them.
What changed: every template applies cleanly on every plan, and the custom fonts feature is no longer paywalled at all. Google Fonts is free for us to serve. A paywall that exists only because nobody pointed at it shouldn't exist.
2. Free-tier accounts locked out of features that were always free
The profile editor has tabs for Store, Hire Me, and Events. On free-plan accounts, all three showed a lock icon. Clicking any of them opened the upgrade modal. You could not reach the tab content at all.
The data layer was correctly configured the whole time. Store allows up to 3 products on the free plan. Events are free for every tier (the code comment on the events handler literally reads "Bio events are FREE for all tiers"). Hire Me has no tier gating at all. The editor UI was the only thing saying you needed to upgrade.
What changed: free accounts can now open Store, Hire Me, and Events. The tabs load straight into the editor with their own tier hints inline ("Free tier: up to 3 products"). Sections stays Pro because it is a 7-block page builder that is genuinely a Bio Pro feature. The lock came off the three tabs that should never have had one.
While in there: the legacy cyan-and-magenta gradient that used to ship as the default background got cleaned up across 15 existing profiles. New accounts now load with the standard brand canvas. Profiles still on the old default got migrated in place.
3. The AI chat bubble covering buttons people came for
The Ask AI bubble in the bottom-right corner of EdgeURL sits on top of anything anchored to the same corner. Three pages had real conflicts.
Event pages. The Get Tickets CTA anchors to the bottom of the screen on mobile. So does the chat bubble. The chat bubble's layer won. The primary conversion action on the page was hidden behind a button about asking EdgeURL a question.
Paused or expired short links. The Powered by EdgeURL badge that earns the link owner a referral commission on any signup it drives sat behind the same bubble. On a high-traffic dead link, that is real attribution being silently dropped.
Public creator bio pages. A visitor arriving to look at someone's profile got a floating "Ask AI about EdgeURL" interrupt. They came for the creator, not for EdgeURL's assistant.
What changed: the chat bubble now hides on event pages, paused or expired link pages, and public creator bio pages. It still appears on marketing pages, docs, the blog, and inside the dashboard, where a visitor would actually want to ask about EdgeURL.
4. A signup that broke for one day
For roughly 24 hours, every new account that tried to set a username got back "Failed to create your profile page." The error fired at the first step of onboarding.
Cause was internal. A small database column had been dropped in a cleanup pass. One code path still referenced it.
What changed: the dead reference is gone, and an automated check on every push catches this specific pattern (code referencing a column that no longer exists). Same family as the type-safety work shipped for competitor pricing a few weeks ago.
5. AI chat on the free tier (5 messages a day, not zero)
Free signed-in users opening chat in the dashboard got a "Pro required" message. Anonymous visitors on the EdgeURL homepage got 30 chat messages a day. Signing up reduced your access.
The prompt to use the public chat literally said "sign up for a free EdgeURL account to keep chatting." Signing up did the opposite of that.
What changed: every signed-in free account gets 5 AI chat messages a day in the dashboard. Add your own AI provider key in Settings (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, or OpenRouter) and that goes to 100 a day. You pay your own provider. We do not mark it up. Creator plans get 25 a day, unlimited with your own key, and the chat can actually take actions on your account (create links, update bio, pull analytics). Pro adds those tool actions without needing a key of your own.
Same shape across every plan now: bring your own AI key, your account opens up.
6. Dead links leaking the original target
When a short link got paused, expired, or removed, the page visitors landed on used to render the original target's title and topic tags from cache. If a link was paused because the destination changed into something off-brand or got flagged, the dead-link page was still broadcasting what it used to be.
What changed: the dead-link page reads none of that cached metadata anymore. Generic copy, EdgeURL badge, nothing else.
What these have in common
Most were not new bugs. They were old code paths that stopped matching reality after the platform's policies changed underneath them.
- The locked-out Store/Hire/Events tabs were a fossil from when those features really were Pro-only.
- The template font block was a fossil from a paywall we lifted.
- The free-tier chat lockout was a fossil from a pricing model we revised.
Reporting bugs
If you find something broken, the contact form on edgeurl.io routes directly. We read every one.