Every entrepreneur wonders: “Will my startup sink or swim?” When Felix Brandon and his wife Jordan Lloyd Bookey launched Zoobean, a startup focused on children’s reading, they found themselves swimming in rough waters early on. A few months after launch, the founders were invited to pitch their business on the TV show Shark Tank.

What felt like a sinking moment turned into more than a lifeline for the fledgling business — it entirely transformed their business model. In the year that followed the Shark Tank episode, Zoobean went from a consumer subscription service to an enterprise reading program platform loved by millions of readers of all ages.

From the mouths of babes to the...

Asynchronous provisioning allows add-ons to perform out-of-band provisioning in a first-class way. It’s intended for add-on services that need extended time to set up and help make automated app setup and orchestration easier and less error-prone.

The customer will be billed as soon as the add-on starts provisioning. This means the time and cost of provisioning your service is accounted for in how much a customer pays. As such, you should make every effort to provision expediently so customers get value from your service as quickly as possible.

Add-ons that take longer than 12 hours to provision (or those your service fails to mark as “provisioned” via the API in that time period) will be...

Need to quickly catch up on this past quarter's announcements? Here are the top three topics to tune in on:

The Platform API for Partners provides many official endpoints that allow you to introspect security settings, discover other customer instances of the same add-on, and much more. With the Platform API, add-ons have an OAuth client secret and a number of OAuth authorizations, one token per provisioned add-on; it is only used to authenticate requests to create the scoped tokens and not used to authenticate other requests to the Platform API.

Updated password requirements for the add-on manifest go into effect as of December 15, 2017. Add-on manifest password values are required...

The Platform API for Partners provides many official endpoints that the App Info API doesn’t support. These endpoints let you introspect security settings, discover other customer instances of the same add-on, and much more. Platform API for Partners endpoints are also more consistent and “better traveled.” Heroku uses these endpoints internally, and customers also use them directly.

With the Platform API, add-ons have an OAuth client secret and a number of OAuth authorizations, one token per provisioned add-on. The OAuth client secret is only used to authenticate requests to create the scoped tokens; it is not used to authenticate other requests to the Platform API.

All new add-ons that...

We are excited to announce that the new Heroku Partner Portal for Add-ons is now generally available.

The new portal offers an improved partner experience for building, managing, and updating Heroku add-ons. Our goal is to create a workflow that will give you more freedom and enable you to bring your add-ons to market more easily.

The new portal has been organized into a simple, elegant interface that is similar to the rest of Heroku's products. In each section, we've made more functionality available via the portal interface, where in the past emails or support tickets might have been necessary. This release brings a more visual approach as well as greater focus to creating and...