How to Convert Your Legacy HubSpot Developer Account

Hi everyone. My name is Roger Brown. I'm a product manager in the developer product group. My focus is on our app platform and helping our ecosystem grow and manage their installs and customers using HubSpot. So today in this particular session, I'm going to show you all what it's like to convert your prior developer platform to the new unified platform. Daniel mentioned and show you why we made this change, talk about some of the benefits, and then also demo the process if you guys want to follow along. I assume actually most of the audience at this point is using the new developer platform, so you're probably already familiar with some of the features I'm going to cover. But if you're not, hopefully you'll learn something in this session. Why did we go through this change? And you'll see in a minute as I do the demo that we had built the prior version of the developer portal specific to the needs of the developer without ultimately adjusting for the long-term value that came from HubSpot holistically. And so it'd be starting to become disconnected from some of the other experiences that our partners were using at scale with HubSpot, and it became hard to manage and maintain between different versions of things. We decided to make a shift and unify basically the experience across all customers, whether they were developing for the marketplace or for their own personal consumption. And customization needs. And so all developer platforms that were previously using the old system are now going to be in the new unified platform, which means you'll have access to the first time of free versions of the CRM product at HubSpot and other features that you can use or choose not to. And so what is involved in kind of the process? It's a self-service option for now. So customers can opt into this, and we are in the process of fully transitioning everyone to the unified platform by the end of, end of this month. So what are the main benefits of conversion? The first thing you get is if you participate in the marketplace and list an app, you will get a, you get enrolled in our tech partner program. And so this gives you access to a bunch of benefits that you can find through the documentation. I believe there's a link that's going to be shared in addition to the poll that's going out now, so you can access the information there. The other thing that I mentioned previously is you get access to the CRM product, which will help manage your install base, your customers, outreach, things like that. You can choose not to use that feature, but we're going to start to incorporate a lot more of the developer-facing tooling into the CRM product itself, so that will become more valuable over time. And then it's a unified workspace for customers that are already using HubSpot so that they get to manage their apps in one place along with their actual day-to-day usage of HubSpot for various reasons. And finally, we've standardized and modernized all of our developer tooling to be consistent across any type of development. So you use the CLI and our new projects framework to manage all of your apps and their features over time, including a much better local development experience. Access to things like CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions, our MCP server specific to development, which will help in creating new features, and then other things that I'll show in a second, like App Homes, agent tools, and app objects. So let's quickly cover what changes are being made. Accounts are basically updating to a free version of the CRM product, which means you get access to all of the features there. And now you'll notice that there's a new developer overview page, which will centralize kind of your engagement with the developer platform overall. All and give you quick access to things that you need, as well as being updated regularly and dynamically adjusting based on your progress or certain things happening with your applications for your customers. So one core change here is that administration for the portal or the account itself is limited to two what we call core seats on the CRM side. So those have full access to manage users and other things. and everyone else that needs to help manage the app will be using a developer seat to access the platform. That's one small change between the old one and the new one that I'll talk about a little bit more, but that's probably one of the most noticeable things other than obviously the new UIs and things like that. But what stays the same is your configurations and your installs. So none of your apps change, and along with their auth tokens, credentials, everything they're using to install the app. So all of that stays consistent along with your marketplace listings and all the content there. So what does the process look like? It's actually very quick. This makes it look more complicated than it actually is. I'll demo the whole thing end to end. But basically, you log into the platform, you find the banner which has a prompt to convert, you review it, you confirm it, and then there's this— there's a quick turnaround before the account is converted, and then you get to see the new features. So that's the full end-to-end flow, and I am going to demonstrate for you all now what that looks like. So I have a lot of accounts here, but I saved one in an old state. So this actually has the new styling theme. So that might look a little bit different, but otherwise, as I was describing before, our previous developer platform only had access to a few things here in the navigation menu. That's what we see here. But one of the key things I want to call out is I already have two apps. That exist, right? One of, one of those was created using the first iteration of project support for public apps. So that's running on platform version 2025.1, I believe. 2025.1 and one legacy app that was created before that. So now I'm just going to go through the flow like I mentioned before, confirm that I understand process. So that's the banner I mentioned. If some of the folks in the call want to follow along and do this along with me, you're more than welcome to do that as well. And in just a moment, the platform is going to update with the new version, and I can also refresh in one second. So you can see that my navigation menu changed slightly from what was there in the past because now I have access to the CRM features. And now this is the development overview page that I was talking about before. So you can see on here it has information about some of my recent activity, how close I am to my API limits, some of the tasks that are outstanding, recent news, betas. I can participate in a bunch of new features along with everything that I had previously. So that would be access to my apps that I had before and also my projects. So that is the conversion process. End to end. I'll go back to full screen now and just quickly mention that basically, like, like we just saw, the developer overview page is our centralized activity center for all the things that you're doing for development in HubSpot. And then you also get access to CRM tools. Developer seats are a way to invite members to your portal at no cost to help in managing the development lifecycle and apps. And you still get access to CRM features as well for free. And finally, we're going to show in the next session what CLI looks like and how our modern tools kind of work with the platform. But this was just interest set, but a lot of the engagement with the tool is coming via CLI. And it's important to just call out quickly that after you go through the conversion process, you're, you have 14 days. Let's say you have 10 users in your account before you start the conversion. Some of those might have already been super admins. You only have 14 days to choose which users will have the full administrative capabilities in the core seats, and everyone else will get assigned to the developer seat. And let me just double check on time, but we, we have time if there are any questions to take live.

Hey Roger, joining you, just helping from a Q&A moderation that we have not had any live questions come on board, so folks that are watching in here and supporting Roger, and we can ask some questions if you want to pop those into the Q&A tab above the chat. You can change the tabs there. We can address those live.

I guess while we're waiting for that, let's go over the poll results. What's your biggest concern about converting? It seems like most of the votes were for disrupting live customer installs. Oh, we're getting more votes in now. So this is changing. But let, I think that's, that's a fear that we covered in the earlier section, which is you shouldn't have any fear of that because nothing happens to your apps. It's just the portals and what the portal features or the account has access to that is changing in the conversion process. So where are you in the conversion process? It seems like most of the folks actually haven't started yet. You have. So like I mentioned, we've been messaging the community in our ecosystem over the past month or so. About the deadlines, but if you don't self-service in the next couple weeks, your account's going to be auto-migrated or auto-converted, and then you'll have 14 days to manage the seats. It's up to you to decide when you control that, obviously, but now that you know about it, might be worthwhile to do it now. Most of the folks have not already.

Marcello's added a question in the Q&A related to that. And when is the conversion required to be completed? For the portal conversion, just for clarity's sake, that by March 31st will be then the due date for converting, and then you have this 2-week window that Roger is referencing to make sure that your seats are assigned appropriately. Don has a question as well. I know you answered it a little bit, Roger, but make sure that we're bringing all the clarity. Will this conversion interrupt current live installs of the Marketplace app for clients?

So the answer is no, and the way that we've designed this overall renovation slash evolution of our platform is to think about it in two stages. The first is really rolling out the developer platform to all of our partners and customers. And that's what we're talking about here. It has no impact on your actual apps or their installs or the functionality of their apps. That is the focus of this content, but you should know that like the next phase will be up to you to decide. And what we're going to have a demo section, or we're going to have another session in a little bit of time here to talk about what it looked like to self-service into the new platform versions on a per-app basis. And that's the point in which the apps themselves start to be impacted. Looks like we have— do we have time for one more or—

Yeah, we've got one coming in where someone has been trying to make it through the steps to adopt our dev platform. So we have issue that has been ran into previously, had a project powered app, projects version 2025.1, later converted my portal and upgraded my projects to 2025.2. Then found that I cannot test my app install link, or it returns an error. And when I click test install, it asks me to list my app, but I don't want to because this is a test app.

Yeah, I need a little bit more information to troubleshoot and give you more direct feedback there. But I'm guessing that when you upgraded to the 2025.2 platform version, your app already had more than 25 installs. And that could have been just installs used explicitly for testing. In test accounts. But one of the requirements we have for Marketplace listed apps now is that any apps on 2025.2 that are intended to be listed in the Marketplace go through the review process and do end up getting approved for the Marketplace. So one of the things you have to— will likely have to do to get more installs is to actually uninstall unused slots for it. So if it's only being used for for testing purposes, you probably want to manage the inventory of that 25, maybe a little bit more explicitly. We have an API— sorry, I just got the popup about the next session, but we have an API you can use to uninstall accounts on your app, which will help with that process. And then once that's done, you should be able to install more. This is also provided to you inside of the distribution tab. If you join the next session, we'll probably cover this a little bit where you can see the counts. That we recognize in terms of managing that limit.

All right, thanks everyone for adding your questions to our Q&A. Follow Roger to the next session where we'll continue on this journey. Thanks all.