What to do when you update a file people already bought

You've found a mistake on page 12, or the tax rate changed, or someone pointed out that a formula breaks on the second sheet. Either way 240 people already have the old version and you're now working out what you owe them.

The short answer, and it's better than most people expect: replace the file on the product and every buyer whose download link is still open gets the new version the next time they open it. You don't re-send anything. The link points at the product, not at a copy, so the file it hands over is whatever file is there now.

The problem is the word "open". A link that has expired, or whose download limit is used up, hands over nothing at all, and on a 30-day expiry that's most of your 240 buyers by month two. Those people are a manual job, and this article is mostly about them.

Two kinds of update

Sort every change into one of these before you do anything, because they need different amounts of effort.

A correction. A typo, a broken formula, a link that goes nowhere, a price that's out of date. The buyer's copy is wrong and they may not know it. This needs fixing and, if it's material, telling people about.

An improvement. Ten new templates, a better layout, an extra chapter. The buyer's copy still works. This is a nice thing to hand over and it's also a reason for someone to talk about you.

The distinction matters because it decides your obligation. A correction to something that affects the buyer's actual work, a wrong tax rate in a bookkeeping template, say, is not optional and it needs a message, not just a silent file swap. An improvement can be delivered quietly and mentioned once.

Silent corrections are the failure. Someone using your spreadsheet with the wrong VAT rate for four months, while a fixed version sits on your shop that they never knew about, is a genuinely bad outcome and it's entirely avoidable.

What happens automatically

Here's the mechanism, because knowing it changes what you promise on the sales page.

A buyer's download link names their order. When they open it, the shop looks up the files currently attached to the product they bought and hands those over. It doesn't hand over a frozen copy taken at the moment of purchase.

Three consequences:

• Replace a file and every live link now serves the new one. No re-sending, no new links, nothing for you to do.
• Add a file and every live link now includes it. Which is how you deliver the "I added ten more templates" update.
• Delete a file and it disappears from their link too. Be careful here. If you remove the old version before uploading the new one, anybody who opens the link in that gap gets a short list and a confused feeling.

So the order of operations is: upload the new file first, check it's there, then remove the old one. Two minutes, and it saves you the message from the person who happened to look during the gap.

The link that already expired

This is the part nobody writes about, so here it is plainly.

If the buyer's link has passed its expiry date, or they've used up their download allowance, the link returns an error. Not a smaller list, not the old version. Nothing. And there's no reset: re-confirming the payment doesn't reopen it, because the release already happened and it only happens once.

Which means for those buyers, the update is a manual job. You send them the new file yourself, by email or whatever channel you already use with them, as an attachment or a link you control. It's a chore and it's the correct thing to do.

The scale of the chore depends entirely on a setting you chose months earlier, which brings us to the trade-off at the centre of this whole topic.

Expiry and updates pull in opposite directions

You cannot have both a tight expiry and effortless lifetime updates. Pick.

A 30-day expiry is a reasonable default for a file you'll never touch again. It stops a link being pasted into a group chat two years later, it caps your storage bandwidth, and it puts a boundary on your support window.

A blank expiry, meaning the link never dies, is what makes updates automatic forever. Every buyer, from your first sale to your last, opens the same link in 2029 and gets whatever version is current. That's a genuinely good product experience and it's the only way "free updates for life" is anything other than a manual promise you'll break.

Expiry	Update reaches past buyers	Link-sharing risk	Your workload
30 days	Only buyers from the last month	Low	High. Everyone else is a manual send.
1 year	Most buyers	Medium	Occasional manual sends.
Never	All of them, forever	Highest	None.

Decide whether this file is one you'll update before you set the expiry, not after you've found the mistake.

For a one-off ebook you'll never revisit, 30 days is fine. For a spreadsheet, a template pack, or anything with dates or tax rates in it, set it to never and accept that the link will leak eventually. Your speed bump was never a lock anyway.

There's a middle position that works well: a long expiry, say a year, on products you actively maintain, and 30 days on everything else. Set it per product, which is where the setting lives.

The download limit is the second wall

Expiry isn't the only thing that closes a link. The download limit does too, and it's easier to hit than people expect.

The limit counts every file a buyer opens, across their whole order, not per file and not per visit. A five-download limit on a four-file pack means the buyer has used four of their five just getting the thing the first time. When your update lands, they have one attempt at one file and then they're out.

So if you intend to ship updates, set the limit generously or leave it blank. Twenty-five is plenty for a multi-file product. Blank is right for anything you've promised to keep current, because a limit that runs out silently produces the worst version of this conversation: a buyer who paid, who is entitled to the update, and who gets an error message that sounds like an accusation.

If your files are large enough that buyers are retrying failed downloads, the limit gets eaten even faster, and how to send large files to customers covers why a download that dies at 80% still spends an allowance.

Version the filename

The buyer downloads a file called whatever the file is called now. They can't see a version history, a changelog or an upload date. All they have is the filename.

So put the version in it. Bookkeeping-Tracker-v3-Aug2026.xlsx tells a buyer, six months later, in their downloads folder, exactly what they have. tracker-final.xlsx tells them nothing and generates a message asking whether theirs is the latest.

Use a date rather than a number if your product is tied to a year or a tax period. Use a number if it isn't. Either way, be consistent, and change it every time the contents change, including for small fixes. The filename is your entire version control system and it costs nothing.

Put the same version number on the first page inside the file, and in the read-me if there is one. Then when someone sends you a screenshot of a problem, you can tell at a glance whether they're on the version that already has the fix.

The changelog nobody asks for

Add a short section to the product page listing what changed and when. Three lines per version, dated, newest at the top.

It does three things at once. It reassures a prospective buyer that the file is maintained, which is a real purchase factor for anything a person will use for work. It answers "is this up to date for 2026" without a message. And it gives you somewhere to point when an existing buyer asks what they're missing.

Keep it plain:

v3, August 2026. Fixed VAT calculation on the summary sheet. Added a second income tab. v2, March 2026. New expense categories. Faster monthly totals.

That's more convincing than any paragraph of marketing copy on the same page, and it takes ninety seconds to write while the change is fresh.

What to promise, and what not to

"Free lifetime updates" is a lovely line and it's a bigger commitment than most sellers realise. It means you're on the hook for a file forever, including in three years when you've moved on and someone messages you about a broken formula. It also means you can never sell version 2 as a new product, which for some businesses is the whole plan.

Safer promises that are still worth something:

• "Updates included for 12 months." Bounded, honest, easy to honour.
• "Free corrections, paid upgrades." You'll always fix what's broken. A substantially bigger version is a new purchase, usually at a discount for existing buyers.
• "Updated for each tax year." Specific, and it tells the buyer exactly why they'd come back.

Whatever you choose, write it on the product page before someone asks. Setting the expectation before the sale costs you nothing and prevents the argument entirely.

And if you promise anything, set the expiry and the download limit to match. A "lifetime updates" promise on a product with a 30-day link is a promise you've technically made and structurally cannot keep.

Telling past buyers when you have no mailing list

You've fixed the file. Now, who do you tell, and how?

If you took email addresses at checkout, you have a list, and it's the list that matters most. One message, short, subject line naming the product and the version. Say what changed, say what to do, and include the file itself or a link if their download has expired.

The bookkeeping tracker has been updated to v3. The VAT formula on the summary sheet was wrong for the new rate. Your original download link still works if it's within 90 days of purchase, and it'll give you the new version. If it doesn't open, reply here and I'll send it straight over.

That paragraph handles both groups in one message and it doesn't require you to know who's expired and who isn't. Let the link sort it out.

If you don't have emails, this is the moment you'll wish you did, and it's a good reason to start. How to build an email list without a website covers the mechanics. In the meantime, post the update wherever your buyers found you, and pin it. Some will see it.

For anything safety-critical or money-critical, don't rely on people seeing a post. Message them individually. Forty WhatsApp messages is an unpleasant hour and it's still the right call when the error affects someone's tax return.

When the update is really a new product

Not everything is an update. Sometimes you've made a different thing and calling it version 2 is costing you money.

The test: would someone who owns the old one buy this on its own merits? If your planner went from 20 pages to 90 pages with a new system in it, that's a product. Sell it. Offer existing buyers a discount, 40% is generous and normal, and keep the old one available for anyone who wants the simple version.

If it's the same product with fixes and a few additions, it's an update, and charging for it will annoy people more than the revenue is worth.

Where it gets genuinely tricky is the annual edition. A 2027 tax template is not really an update to the 2026 one, and buyers understand paying again for a new year. Say so at the point of sale, plainly, so nobody feels ambushed twelve months later.

Worked example: Wanjiru in Mombasa

Wanjiru sells a bookkeeping spreadsheet for small Kenyan shops at KSh 1,800. About 240 sales over eight months, mostly through a Facebook group she's active in.

A rate change meant one formula on her summary sheet was producing the wrong figure. Not catastrophic, but wrong, and her buyers were using it to file.

What she found when she went to fix it: her download expiry was set to 30 days, so only 31 of her 240 buyers still had a working link. The other 209 were manual.

What she did, in order:

1. Fixed the formula, renamed the file Duka-Books-v4-2026.xlsx, uploaded it, checked it appeared, then deleted the old file.
2. Changed the expiry on the product from 30 days to blank, and the download limit from 5 to blank, so this never happens again.
3. Emailed the 186 buyers who'd given an email address, with the fixed file attached directly rather than a link, because an attachment removes every possible failure.
4. Posted in the Facebook group, pinned it, and asked anyone who'd bought it to check their version number.
5. Added a changelog block to the product page.

Twenty-three buyers she couldn't reach at all. Six of them surfaced over the following two months and she sent the file by hand.

Her actual regret has nothing to do with the formula. She'd been asking for a phone number at checkout and treating the email field as optional, so a quarter of her buyers were unreachable at the exact moment it mattered. She now asks for email on every order and explains why in one line: "so I can send you updates".

The other thing she'd tell you: turning the expiry off produced no visible increase in piracy that she could detect, and it turned her most annoying support thread into nothing. That's not proof of anything, but it's the outcome for one seller with 240 buyers, and it matches what most people find. A leaked link was never the thing limiting her sales.

Do this before your next edit

Open your best-selling digital product and look at two settings. If it's a file you'll ever update, set the expiry to blank and the download limit to blank or 25. If it's a one-off you'll never touch, leave the 30-day expiry alone.

Then rename your current file with a version and a date in it, upload it, and add a three-line changelog to the product page.

Then check whether you're actually collecting email addresses at checkout, because that's the difference between an update that takes ten minutes and one that takes a week. Getting people to come back a second time is the whole game with digital products, and how to get repeat customers is the wider version of that. If you're still deciding how the delivery side of your shop should work at all, how to sell digital products and services online covers the shape of it.