Native integration concepts

Native integrations allow a two-way connection between Vercel and third-party providers. This enables providers to embed their services into the Vercel ecosystem so that Vercel customers can subscribe to third-party products directly through the Vercel dashboard, providing several key benefits to the integration user:

• They do not need to create an account on your site.
• They can choose suitable billing plans for each product through the Vercel dashboard.
• Billing is managed through their Vercel account.

This document outlines core concepts, structure, and best practices for creating robust, scalable integrations that align with Vercel's ecosystem and user expectations.

Team installations are the foundation of native integrations, providing a secure and organized way to connect user teams with specific integrations. You can then enable centralized management and access control to integration resources through the Vercel dashboard.

Understanding the limits of team installation instances for all types of integrations can help you design a better integration architecture.

Products represent the offerings available within an integration, allowing integration users to select and customize an asset such as "ACME Redis Database" or a service such as "ACME 24/7 support" that they would like to use and subscribe to. They provide a structured way to package and present integration capabilities to users.

Resources are the actual instances of products that integration users provision and utilize. They provide the flexibility and granularity needed for users to tailor the integration to their specific needs and project structures.

Integration users can add and manage resources in various ways. For example:

• Single resource: Using one resource such as one database for all projects.
• Per-project resources: Dedicating separate resources for each project.
• Environment-specific resources: Using separate resources for different environments (development, preview, production) within a project.

The diagram below illustrates the relationships between team installations, products, and resources:

• One installation can host multiple products and resources.
• One product can have multiple resource instances.
• Resources can be connected to multiple projects independently.

Billing and usage tracking are crucial aspects of native integrations that are designed to help you create a system of transparent billing based on resource utilization. It enables flexible pricing models and provides users with clear insights into their integration costs.

We recommend you implement resource-level billing, which is the default, to provide users with detailed cost breakdowns and enable more flexible pricing strategies.