Last updated 13 July 2020

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 available in Dev Center, and please see Getting Support as an Add-on Partner to get in touch with us.

Heroku Partner Portal

The Partner Portal gives you a single place to manage your add-ons and your relationship with Heroku.

For new add-on partners, the Partner Portal offers instructions on how to build your add-on and submit it to Heroku. For current add-on partners, the Partner Portal serves as a place to manage all aspects of your add-on. Sections of the portal include:

• Marketplace Listing: update your add-on’s listing in the Elements marketplace
• Features & Plans: create and update your add-on plans and pricing
• Reports: download monthly revenue reports
• Logs: get visibility on issues your customers might be experiencing with your add-on
• Company: update company information or add users
• Settings: update settings for your add-on or view OAuth credentials
• Next Steps: resources on how to progress your add-on to Beta, GA, and beyond

Registering

Before you can use the Partner Portal or upload your add-on to Heroku, 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.

Technical implementation

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