Autosave protects your work. Publish records it. Here's what the green button actually does, why your trend charts are waiting on it, and how it decides what a share link shows.
The brand editor saves every keystroke on its own — you never lose work. So why is there a green Publish button? Because a stream of autosaves tells you what your pricing is right now, and nothing else. Publishing turns "right now" into a numbered, dated, read-only snapshot — the raw material for version history, analytics trends, and share links.
Clicking Publish creates a published snapshot of your brand's current pricing and files it in your version history as v1, v2, v3… with an optional label. Every publish also records a full set of metrics that the analytics trend charts plot over time, and gives share links a stable version to point at. Autosave does none of that — it just keeps your draft safe.
Two different systems protect your pricing, and they answer two different questions:
The badge in the brand toolbar tracks the relationship between the two. Never published means no snapshot exists yet. Draft changes means you've edited since your last publish — your live pricing has drifted from the snapshot. Published means the two match. Nothing about a draft is unsafe; the badge is about history, not data loss.
The Publish button sits in the brand editor's actions bar, next to Share. Clicking it:
From that panel you can open any version read-only — a banner reminds you which one you're viewing — and either go Back to draft or Restore this version to make it your working copy again. Publishing never overwrites anything; each snapshot is a new entry. How far back you can browse depends on your plan — the numbers are in Every Plan Limit in One Place — and testing what-if scenarios against your draft — and restoring old versions — is the subject of Compare & Versions.
The Analytics page doesn't recompute your history from scratch — it plots metric records that were written down as they happened. Each record captures your brand's vitals at one moment, per market: SKU count, average FOB, average GP per case, average distributor and retail margins, total FOB, and average shelf price.
Two events write those records, on very different terms:
The margin and GP trend lines need at least two data points on different days before they draw anything — until then the chart itself tells you to publish. A brand you price once and never touch again produces exactly one point, and one point is not a trend. Publish today, publish again after your next price change, and the lines appear.
This is also why publishing per market pays off: metrics carry the market they were recorded for, so the analytics filters can show you how your California pricing moved separately from your Texas pricing. Markets themselves are covered in Markets.
Share links and publishing are joined at the hip: a share link shows a snapshot, never your live draft. Try to share a brand that's never been published and Alculator stops you — publishing, as the prompt puts it, "creates a snapshot that can be shared as a read-only link" — and offers a Publish Now shortcut.
The part that surprises people: a share link pins the version it was created from. The share modal says exactly which one — "Sharing v4" — and that's what recipients see, no matter how many times you publish afterwards. Republishing does not silently update links you've already sent out. That's a feature: the distributor reviewing your March pricing keeps seeing March pricing while you experiment with April's.
When you do want a link to move forward, open the Share modal and click Update to latest. It's a deliberate, per-link action — if you've shared the same brand with several partners, each link is moved (or left pinned) on its own. The full lifecycle — creating, view counts, updating, revoking — lives in Share Links.
Publish whenever the numbers become official — when you'd be willing to put them in front of someone. In practice:
What you shouldn't do is publish after every edit. Autosave already has your back, and a history where every third entry is "fixed a typo" is harder to read than one where every version marks a decision.
Save a brand, click Publish, and give your history something to chart.
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