This morning we are very excited to announce our new Add-on Provider Program, which allows anyone to easily build a Heroku add-on, making it available to all Heroku developers and customers to purchase with one click.

We first launched add-ons almost a year ago. Since then, they have been hugely successful, many add-ons being purchased thousands of times.

Hundreds of cloud service providers have contacted us wanting to build their own add-ons. We’ve spent the past nine months iterating with add-on providers to create an API that’s easy to use and easy to get started with. We’re excited to release it to you today!

API and Developer Kit

We have a full developer kit for building add-ons, including a provisioning API, single-sign on for tight integration into the Heroku user experience, tools for local development and testing of API calls, and a smooth, well established process for building, integrating, and testing add-ons that has been used by many of our existing providers.

Resource Center

We have also built a Resource Center for providers that contains an overview of the program, detailed how-to guides, sample code, reference materials, and best practices for building and operating a cloud service.

Program Benefits

The provider program is an excellent opportunity to build a business around a cloud service, with an easy distribution channel to all Heroku developers and customers.

Some of the benefits of the program include:

• Make your service available to all of our developers and customers
• Create a detailed listing in our Add-ons Catalog
• Allow customers to activate your add-on instantly with one-click
• Manage billing, payments, and upgrades easily through our system
• Use our development kit for local testing of API calls
• Operate your cloud service with our documented best practices
• Alpha and beta test your add-on with our established process
• Get feedback from our large group of private beta testers

We’re Serious about Providers

We believe that the ability to consume external services from within Heroku is a critical part of being an application platform, so we have invested heavily in our add-ons system and now our provider program, and will continue to do so.

Heroku is dedicated to building a neutral marketplace of cloud services. We will encourage competition, base our policies on objective metrics everywhere possible, and help to accelerate merit-based adoption of third party add-ons.

With dozens of providers already working on new add-ons and hundreds getting started today, we are very excited about providing a high-quality, self-service program for providers.

If you have any questions about the new program or need help getting started, please feel free to contact the add-ons team.

Customer Feedback

Our primary interest in add-ons is the tremendous value they can deliver to Heroku users. We want to hear as much feedback as possible from our users and customers about add-ons. We are building some great tools to make it easy for customers to share feedback and requests with us and with our providers.

Have a review of a particular provider? Have a service you would like to see an add-on for? Let us know!

Official press release here.