oth the price sheet and the brochure carried the same line: quotes are valid for thirty days. It is a normal thing to print, and it was true in the sense that we meant it. It was not true in the sense that anything checked.
A link sent in April still bought at April's prices in July. Nobody exploited that, because nobody had thought to — but having printed the promise, we would have been held to whichever half of it favoured the client, which is the correct outcome and an expensive one.
Apromiseprintedonadocumentisarule.Theonlyquestioniswhetherthesoftwareknowsaboutit.
It is tempting to enforce this on the page and stop there — show an expired notice, hide the button, done. That protects nobody. The interesting request is not the one that renders a page, it is the one that takes the money, and it can be issued by a browser tab that has been open since before the quote expired.
So both public routes refuse, including the one behind the pay button. A tab left open for a fortnight is not a hypothetical; it is how a large share of slow deals actually get paid.
Expiry needs a start date, and ours came from a timestamp stamped when the contract went out. Except there were two doors that sent a quote, and only one of them stamped it. The older route did; the newer one — added when the price sheet learned to apply a quote and send it in the same click — did not.
An expiry keyed to a timestamp that only one door writes is an expiry that silently never fires on the other. And the other was the newer, busier door: the one a rep uses mid-call. We would have shipped a rule that worked perfectly in the path nobody used any more.
The day this shipped, every quote sent more than thirty days earlier expired at once. That is the intended behaviour arriving all at once rather than gradually, and we decided to take it rather than grandfather everything, because the alternative — a rule that applies only to quotes sent after the deploy — quietly means the old links never expire at all. Re-sending a quote restarts its clock, and anyone who has already signed is unaffected: an expired quote does not un-sign a signed agreement.