Announcing Closed Preview Apps

We’re excited to announce the general availability of closed preview apps.

Have you ever wanted to test your fancy new app with a few customers before unleashing it into the wild? With our new closed preview state you can! When you submit your new app to us for review through The Marketplace Portal, simply select that you want your app to be in preview.

Once approved, the app will be ready for you to share with your selected customers. It won’t be published to the Zendesk Marketplace and won’t be discoverable.

Using The Marketplace Portal, you can share a unique access link with your preview customers. By clicking the link, your customers will be taken directly to the app installation flow. Simple, right?

You could say that this is like a closed beta testing state for an app, but it could have wider-reaching use cases. For example, say you have a free app on the Zendesk Marketplace that you’ve tweaked for a few bigger customers and you want to charge these customers for this updated app. You can now submit this new tweaked app as a closed preview app and then allow only those customers access to the app. You can use our paid apps feature to charge for this app or invoice the customers directly.

Once you’ve finished testing your app with your selected customers, you can submit an update letting us know that you want your app to be published to the Zendesk Marketplace. Customers originally invited and accepted into the closed preview will continue to have the app installed. Once it’s live on the Zendesk Marketplace, all Zendesk customers will be able to discover your app. Sit back and watch the installs (and, hopefully, the subscriptions) flood in!

We hope you will find this new feature useful and we look forward to hearing your feedback.