Becoming an Add-on Partner

Last updated 15 November 2016

To effectively market your product to the Heroku community, you will need to be familiar with the basic Heroku user experience. If your team is new to the Heroku platform, we highly recommend you walk through the core concepts of creating and deploying an application on Heroku, to understand what sort of experience your future add-on customers will expect.

Next, read about how your service will interact with the Heroku platform.

After completing the tour, you should be ready to start the technical integration of your add-on service. To help guide you along there’s a step-by-step tutorial and several code examples.

Finally, you should download and review the business terms contained in the Add-on License Agreement.

Building an add-on

One of the key goals of the add-on program is to make the experience of building add-ons as easy as possible. We’ve made sure that it’s an open playground to experiment on. There is no registration or setup required to start building an add-on. In many cases a day or two is all that is needed to produce a working add-on.

Help is also available in Dev Center, by filing a ticket with us with any technical questions about add-on development, and by sending business questions to ecosystem-partners@heroku.com.

Registering

Before you can upload your add-on to Heroku and begin testing it with real users, you must register on our Partner Portal as an add-on partner. All that’s required to do this is a Heroku account.

If you already have an existing account, you will log in with your existing credentials. If not, you will be able to sign up for a new account. When you register, you will need to accept the terms of the Heroku Add-ons License Agreement. The purpose of this agreement is formally set up the business relationship between your company and Heroku. It covers the following:

• Distribution agreement granting Heroku permission to distribute your product via the Heroku Elements Marketplace.
• Intellectual property protection for both parties.
• Revenue sharing terms, including payments, reporting and audits.
• Rules for pricing changes.
• Confidentiality, allowing your company and Heroku to share details about upcoming product features, usage metrics, etc.
• Technical support and marketing responsibilities.

You can download a copy of the agreement here. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the terms and conditions before signing up.

Once registered, you will have access to the Partner Portal, which gives you a single place to manage your add-ons and your relationship with Heroku and offers instructions on how to submit your add-ons to Heroku.

Technical implementation

You must build or integrate your service with Heroku to become an add-on partner. For more information, see Building a Heroku Add-on.