Somebody approves a drawing on Tuesday. On Thursday the file is replaced. The approval still sits there, green, apparently covering a document nobody agreed to. Signoff notices, reopens it, and keeps the original decision as the record of what that person actually saw.
Everything for fourteen days, then free for three approvals a month.
The problem
It is a note that somebody would like one.
Someone flips a column to “Needs approval” and hopes the right person notices. There is no record of who said yes. No way to send something to two people in order. No way to show them the thing they are agreeing to. And nothing happens when they agree — somebody still has to remember to move the item.
The cost of that is not the minutes. It is the argument six months later, when the wrong revision went out and nobody can establish who approved which version, and when.
What it does
Nothing on this page is planned, in beta, or coming soon.
A subitem card has Updates, Files and nowhere to put an app — that is monday, not a gap somebody forgot. So the parent lists its subitems with what is happening to each, and opening one scopes the whole approval to it. The sign-off belongs to the subitem, appears in the list across every board carrying the parent’s name so it can be read at all, and can be sent to somebody outside the company as a link.
Drawings, artwork and screenshots are previewed inside the request — not linked, previewed. A filename with an Open button is an invitation to skip looking. Anything a browser cannot draw is named with its version instead, and every decision records which documents that person had actually opened and which they had not.
One stage or several. Everyone must approve, any one of them is enough, or two of the three directors — set per stage, not once for the whole approval.
Most things that do not pass are not refusals; they are a total out by a line or a sentence that needs moving. Asking for a change is its own outcome, with its own status on your board, and it cannot be sent without saying what to change.
Your board reflects what was decided rather than what somebody remembered to update. Pick your status column and the labels are matched to what is already on your board, so the automations you already have keep firing.
Signoff works out which approvals have gone stale and shows you — this has been waiting four days on Dana; chase it, or leave it? You choose, one at a time. Telling somebody’s manager that work is held up is a social act, not a setting you forgot was on.
A client, an agency, an outside engineer. No monday seat, no login, no per-approver cost. The link names one person, decides one approval, and expires.
Delegation is one click, and the trail shows who was asked, who decided, and that the first person passed it along.
Across every board, oldest first, because the person holding things up usually does not know they are. Alongside it, what has been decided lately — which is the only place the record is visible without opening an item. Routine items with nothing attached can be cleared together; anything with a document must be opened.
The question every manager asks and nobody can put a number on. Typical and slowest time from request to decision, and which stage the time goes into — legal takes three days, everything else takes under one. By stage and never by person: a tool people are measured by is a tool people work around, and then the record stops being written.
The record
An approval nobody outside the tool can read is not evidence of anything.
Any approval prints as a document you can hand to a customer, an auditor or an insurer: who decided, when, how, which version of each file was in front of them, and which documents they had not opened.
It says plainly what it does and does not prove. A record that overstates itself is worse than none, because it is relied on.
Works on a phone, because the people who approve things are the people least often at a desk.
Price
Adding the person whose signature you actually need should never cost more.
Features that are free today stay free on your plan for as long as you are on it. We will not move something you already use behind a higher tier, and we will not turn a free plan into a paid one and keep your work behind it.
That is here because it is the most common thing people say about approval software that let them down — and because your approvals live in your own monday account, so even if we broke this promise you could still read them.
Questions
Your approvals are written to monday's own storage, on the board the app was installed on, inside your account. That is the only place they have ever been. A small service — hosted on Vercel, in the United States — runs the workflow automation and serves the page an outside approver opens. It stores nothing: it reads and writes using a short-lived token monday issues for that single request, and keeps no copy afterwards.
No. They get a signed link that expires — fourteen days at the very longest — which lets them decide one approval and nothing else. It carries no name and no email address.
No, and there is no model anywhere in this product. Routing is done by rules you configure. No large language model, machine learning model or third-party AI service reads your items, comments, attachments or decisions at any point, and we hold no model credentials. That is a decision rather than a gap: the record has to be evidence months later, and evidence produced by something that cannot be reproduced is not evidence.
It goes with your monday account, because that is where it always was. There is nothing to request back from us.
Three approvals a month, free, with every feature turned on. That is enough to find out whether the trail is worth having before anybody pays for anything.
Not on monday.com? Send an approval from here — no account, no install.