Partner & Developer onboarding

This track describes how a developer or partner onboards in your API Portal, from finding an API to calling it in production. Your API Portal runs under your branding, so this is the experience your developers go through on your portal. For why partner onboarding speed matters, see API developer experience.

What is the developer journey in your API Portal?

A developer discovers an API, subscribes to a plan, creates credentials, tries the endpoints, and, on a sandbox plan, moves to production after your review. The plan a developer chooses decides which of these steps apply.

1. Discover. A developer browses your API catalog and opens a product to compare its plans.
2. Subscribe. They pick a plan and run the subscription wizard. The plan decides what happens next: active at once, an approval request, checkout, or a start in the sandbox.
3. Get credentials. They create the credentials their plan grants, shown in full only once.
4. Try endpoints. They call the API from the explorer in your portal, entering the key or secret they saved.
5. Sandbox to production. On a sandbox plan, they build against sandbox credentials, submit for review, and get production credentials after your team approves.
6. Manage. They change plan, upgrade to a newer plan version, or cancel from the subscription.

What decides whether a subscription is active right away?

The plan does, checked in this order. A sandbox plan starts active in the sandbox, free. A plan with an approval group waits for approval. A paid plan sends the developer through checkout. Any other plan is active at once.

See Subscribing to a plan for each branch and what every subscription status means.

Where do developers manage their access?

Each developer works inside a team in your portal. The team holds the subscriptions, and each subscription holds its own credentials and, on scope-based plans, its own granted scopes. A developer requests more access from the subscription's Your Access view.

See Scope grants for how a developer requests Optional and Restricted scopes and how your team approves them.

How does a developer manage a subscription after subscribing?

From the subscription's page in the API Portal. They can change to another plan when the product allows plan changes, upgrade to a newer version of the same plan, and cancel with a date. The SDKs tab offers SDK downloads when the plan's documentation publishes them.

Each action needs the right team access: cancelling needs Full API keys and Full billing access. See Subscribing to a plan and Teams.

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