How To Deploy Without An Account, Then Claim It Later

Your coding agent just finished. It says the app is live, pastes a link, and adds one line you nearly skipped: "Claim it within the hour or it will be deleted."

You never made an account anywhere. So whose site is this, and what happens at the hour mark?

This is the new normal. Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare all let an agent deploy without an account now, and so do some smaller hosts, ours included. The agent publishes first and asks who you are later. You get two links: one to look at, and one to keep it.

It's a good pattern. It's also a confusing one the first time, because the link you were handed is temporary, the clock is short, and claiming usually changes more than people expect.

I'll walk through what's actually happening, how long each host waits before it deletes your work, and what changes when you claim. Then the part most people learn the hard way: why you should never send anyone the first link.

What Does It Mean To Deploy Without An Account?

It means a host puts your site online before it knows who you are. You, or your agent, send the files. The host serves them at a throwaway address and replies with a second link, the claim link, that ties the site to an account later.

Until someone claims it, the site belongs to nobody. That's why it has a timer.

The pattern exists because of AI agents. An agent that has to stop and say "please sign up, verify your email, create an API key and paste it back to me" loses most people at step two. An agent that can publish first and hand over a claim link finishes the job in one go, and you decide afterwards whether it was worth keeping.

So a temporary deploy is a preview with an exit, not a permanent website on a free plan. That distinction matters for everything below.

How Does A Claim Link Work?

A claim link is a one-time address that moves an unclaimed site into whichever account opens it first. The steps are close to identical on every host that offers it:

1. The agent deploys. It sends the built files (or a single page) to the host with no login.
2. The host replies with two links. One is the live site. The other is the claim link, often with an expiry time beside it.
3. You open the live link and check it. This is the whole point of the preview.
4. You open the claim link. It asks you to sign in, or to create an account.
5. The site moves into your account. It stops being temporary and stays online on your plan's terms.
6. Or you do nothing, and the host deletes it when the timer runs out.

The claim link is effectively a key. Anyone who has it can claim the site, so treat it like a password reset email: open it yourself, don't post it in a group chat.

On OxyPages the claim needs a verified email address, and throwaway inboxes are refused. Our help page on claiming an unclaimed link has the exact screens. Other hosts word it differently, but the idea is the same.

Which Hosts Let You Deploy Without An Account?

The three big platforms do, and so do we. The main differences are how long they wait and whether they'll run your build. I checked each vendor's own docs and changelogs in November 2026. These change often, so re-check before you rely on a number.

Two honest notes on that table.

First, the big three give you longer. An hour is twice our 30 minutes, and if you tend to wander off mid-task, that difference is real.

Second, the last column is the one I'd look at if you work in a chat app rather than a terminal. A chat assistant can only call tools through a connector, and a connector that needs a sign-in means you sign in before anything gets published. The MCP specification's section on authorization Of the official MCP servers in that table, as of November 2026, ours is the one that publishes with no sign-in at all, which is what lets a Claude or ChatGPT chat put a page online in one reply.

If you're choosing a host for the long term rather than a preview, that's a different question. The static hosting comparison covers it properly.

A Walkthrough: An Agent Publishes A Demo In One Request

Here's what the whole thing looks like when it goes right. Say you've built a small quiz app with Vite for a Friday team demo, and you ask your agent to put it online.

The agent runs the build first. That turns the source code into a dist folder of plain HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Then it zips the contents of that folder and sends it in one request:

npm run build
cd dist && zip -r ../dist.zip . && cd ..
curl -sS -X POST https://api.oxypages.com/drops/app -H "X-Oxy-Agent: my-agent" -F "file=@dist.zip"

The reply comes back as a few lines of JSON. The important parts look like this:

"url":        "https://unclaimed-k3x9q.myoxypages.com"
"claim_url":  "https://app.oxypages.com/claim/..."
"expires_at": "2026-11-09T12:34:00Z"

The agent gives you both links and says the site goes offline in 30 minutes unless claimed. You open the first link on your phone, tap through two questions, see it works, then open the second link and make a free account. Putting a Claude Code website online walks through the same request from Claude Code.

That's it. No dashboard, no repository, no settings page.

Notice what the agent did not send: the source code, node_modules or package.json. A no-account drop on our side is never built for you, so source is refused with a message telling the agent to run the build first. That's a feature. It means only the finished output leaves your machine, not your source.

What Changes When You Claim?

Claiming makes the site permanent, and on some hosts it also gives it a new address. On ours it always does: the temporary unclaimed- address stops working the moment you claim, and the site carries on at a fresh subdomain in your account, which you can rename.

That's the easy mistake to make. You get the link, send it to a client, then claim the site. The client opens their link an hour later and gets nothing.

So the order is:

1. Open the temporary link yourself, to check it.
2. Claim it.
3. Copy the new address from your account.
4. Send that one.

Two other things can stop a claim. Your account needs room for another project and enough storage on its plan, and a free plan doesn't hold many. If you're already full, the claim page offers an upgrade rather than quietly failing. And a claimed site lives by the plan's rules from then on, so a free plan that's personal and non-commercial stays that way after the claim.

What Happens If You Miss The Window?

The site is deleted, and you deploy again. On every host in the table, an unclaimed site that runs out of time goes offline, and Cloudflare's docs say plainly that the temporary account and its resources are deleted.

We keep the files for a short while after the site goes offline, so a claim link opened a little late still works. After that grace it says the link has expired, and the only fix is a fresh deploy.

That's less painful than it sounds. The agent still has the build on your machine, so redeploying is the same one request again. Just ask it.

What you can't get back is the address. A redeploy gets a new random one, so anything you already shared is dead.

When Is A Temporary Deploy The Wrong Tool?

When you already know you want to keep the site. Then the timer is just a hazard, and a normal deploy into your own account is one less step to forget.

It's also wrong in a few specific cases:

• The app runs code on a server. A temporary static deploy serves files. If your app needs a database, logins, server routes or secret API keys at runtime, it needs a host that runs code, such as Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Workers.
• The folder holds anything private. A temporary site is public the moment it exists. An .env file or a backup sitting in the output folder is readable by anyone with the link.
• You need it to rank. Unclaimed links aren't meant to be found. Drop hosts on our side serve a robots file that blocks crawlers, which Google's robots.txt guide explains is the standard way to keep search engines out.
• You need guaranteed capacity. Anonymous deploys are rate limited on every host, ours included. A chat app's users often share network addresses, so a busy hour can mean a refused deploy.

OxyPages is also the wrong pick if your app renders pages on a server. We serve static output only, with no server rendering and no functions. For a plain folder with no agent involved, Netlify Drop is a good choice too, and the Netlify alternatives post covers where each one wins.

What To Do Next

If an agent just handed you a temporary link, open it on your phone now. You have somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes depending on the host.

Then decide:

1. Keeping it? Claim it, then share the address from your account, not the temporary one.
2. Just checking it? Let it expire. Nothing is lost, the build is still on your machine.
3. Needs a server? Move it to a host that runs code before you show anyone.

If you'd like to see the pattern for yourself, publish a page with no account and watch the claim link arrive. It takes about as long as reading this sentence twice. To keep a personal page, start a free account, no card needed, and claim it inside the window.