Cloud customers developing private applications — what approach are others using?

I’m interested in hearing how other Invision Cloud customers handle custom application development.

I prefer Invision Cloud and intend to keep my community there. However, I recently learned that Cloud customers cannot use IN_DEV or obtain a development environment for building their own private Invision applications.

Invision Support confirmed that a completed custom application can be installed on an Invision Cloud community, but development must be done using a separate Classic/self-hosted license or by hiring a developer who already has one.

This creates an awkward situation. A customer paying for the preferred Cloud platform must also purchase and maintain a separate self-hosted license simply to access the development tools needed to build an application for the Cloud community.

A new Classic license currently costs $499, followed by a $199 annual renewal. That seems excessive when the license would only be used as a local development environment and would never operate a public community.

I may be in a better position than some customers because I previously owned a self-hosted license. My Client Area appears to offer conversion to the current Invision Community Classic terms at $199 per year without another initial purchase. I still need to confirm whether accepting that conversion would restore access to the current software downloads and developer tools.

I would be interested to know what other Cloud customers and developers are doing:

• Do you maintain a separate Classic license solely for local application development?

• Have you moved custom functionality outside Invision and connected it through the API?

• Is there another supported development or testing option I have overlooked?

• Would there be interest in a lower-cost, development-only license or SDK for Cloud subscribers, with no right to operate a separate public community?

I understand why IN_DEV cannot be enabled directly on a shared or managed Cloud production environment. My concern is the absence of a local development entitlement tied to an active Cloud subscription.

I’m not asking for support with a particular application here. I’m trying to understand how the community is handling this limitation and whether there is a practical native-development path for Cloud customers.

Thanks,
Steve

So, I am a little surprised to see that I am the only one with this problem.

Steve

The answer is right there in your original post: a Classic license is required.

You can always use AI, as many people are doing these days. It's a great tool when you know what you're doing and carefully review the code. Otherwise, you're just building ticking time bombs, and I've seen plenty of those already!

17 hours ago, Adriano Faria said:

The answer is right there in your original post: a Classic license is required.

You can always use AI, as many people are doing these days. It's a great tool when you know what you're doing and carefully review the code. Otherwise, you're just building ticking time bombs, and I've seen plenty of those already!

Something I've wondered for some time now: what happens when Classic licenses are no longer available (which has been telegraphed by Invision for some time now)? It may not come tomorrow, but reading between the lines, it seems that Classic licenses will be no longer available for v6. Presumably, there will be some other option for app developers then. But what, I do not know. Has anything been stated about this anywhere?

By the way, I am not attempting to start a discussion about why Invision should retain the Classic option. It is all but stated that they will be dropping Classic licenses sometime in the next few years. And I expect Invision will have compelling business reasons for doing so. But I would like to be assured that third-party app development will remain a viable option come v6 (or whenever Classic licenses are no longer available).

Edited Saturday at 2:19 PM5 days by Como

1 hour ago, Como said:

Something I've wondered for some time now: what happens when Classic licenses are no longer available (which has been telegraphed by Invision for some time now)? It may not come tomorrow, but reading between the lines, it seems that Classic licenses will be no longer available for v6. Presumably, there will be some other option for app developers then. But what, I do not know. Has anything been stated about this anywhere?

By the way, I am not attempting to start a discussion about why Invision should retain the Classic option. It is all but stated that they will be dropping Classic licenses sometime in the next few years. And I expect Invision will have compelling business reasons for doing so. But I would like to be assured that third-party app development will remain a viable option come v6 (or whenever Classic licenses are no longer available).

I think by the time v6 comes out, most developers will have moved on. There's only a few of us remaining.

Edited Saturday at 3:23 PM5 days by Cedric V

1 hour ago, Cedric V said:

I think by the time v6 comes out, most developers will have moved on. There's only a few of us remaining.

Not what I wanted to hear. But thank your for the reply, @Cedric V.

On 11/7/2026 at 2:19 PM, Como said:

Something I've wondered for some time now: what happens when Classic licenses are no longer available (which has been telegraphed by Invision for some time now)?

This is a common myth. We havent said this anywhere. In fact the classic license type was created specifically to try and ensure viability for self hosting

50 minutes ago, Marc said:

This is a common myth. We havent said this anywhere. In fact the classic license type was created specifically to try and ensure viability for self hosting

Hi @Marc

Then why does Invision keep emphasizing how small and unimportant Classic licenses are to your business? Why are there no discernible links for purchasing the Classic license?

This is not me arguing for a particular business model for Invision; you naturally will do what is best for your business - this is only to be expected. But if Classic licenses account only for a very small part of the business (as has been stated several times), and if Cloud is being actively marketed over Classic (it not being listed with the price plans); and with the removal of the Market Place (and more recently, the third-party index), and some modules are not included with Classic (but I understand your rationale for not wishing to include modules which are likely to cause more problems with self-hosting), the overall picture is one of Invision moving away from Classic licenses and third-party development. Given that, as Invision Community is presently constituted, Classic is vital for future third-party development, I'd like to be assured that even if Classic should be dropped at some stage, there will remain a viable path for third-party development.

If it has been stated prominently somewhere that Classic licenses will remain available for the foreseeable future and there are no plans to deprecate them, I withdraw my remarks and apologize. But if not, perhaps this is an argument for providing some kind of prominent (broad strokes) road map available for customers.

So, I have one question: if Classic licenses are dropped at some point, will there remain a viable path for third-party development? Because as @Cedric V stated, most third-party developers have already moved on and he expects most of the remainder will move on by v6. If third-party development remains vitally important to Invision (which you or another member of the team has stated to me in the past), why are so many of us of the opinion that Invision seeks to wind down third-party app development and seems less than fully committed to Classic (Classic licenses being essential to third-party app development).

I am not meaning to be argumentative or give you a hard time about this. But there appears to be a gap between Invision's goals (unpublished road map) and the general perception of customers (particularly Classic license holders and app developers). I do not seek nitty-gritty business plans or Invision's ideas for future module development. But I think we all would benefit from a very clearly stated and easily accessible (broad strokes) road map.

No need to for detailed reply (or any reply). But perhaps reconsider and publish a road map. I think it would help customers. app developers, and Invision too.

5 minutes ago, Como said:

o need to for detailed reply (or any reply). But perhaps reconsider and publish a road map. I think it would help customers. app developers, and Invision too.

We have not published a roadmap for a very long time. Whether self hosted, or otherwise.

The reality here is that yes, self hosted accounts for a very small part of our business. This is not something in which we control, it is something in which the market controls. Gone are the days where people wish to manage their own servers, install their own software. This is very very widespread across the technology industry. Not only in community software, but pretty much all software. My comment above was not to dispel this, but more to point out that we have not stated we are removing it. In fact we have actively created a license type to try and make it a viable product.

As Marc said, Classic isn't going anywhere.

This is purely hypothetical, but we'll likely improve the tech stack Invision Community is built on to be more like a headless app, where you have React/Next running on the public side, which is fed by an API to get the data.

That'll mean there's less opportunity to modify but that doesn't mean you can't add functionality. We'd add things like two way webhooks, scheduled callbacks, spaces on the page for your own features (possibly via authenticated iFrame), etc along with the theme tools, custom CSS and JS.

Nothing is set in stone, of course - these are just my unfiltered thoughts.

This will only make things worse for third-party developers. IPS5 has already significantly limited what we can do, and moving toward an even more restrictive architecture will only make it harder to develop fully integrated applications.

APIs, webhooks, and iFrames are useful, but they simply can’t replace the flexibility and freedom we used to have as developers.

I believe this will ultimately and definitively mark the end of the third-party developer community.

Edited Tuesday at 9:41 PM2 days by Adriano Faria

13 hours ago, Adriano Faria said:

This will only make things worse for third-party developers. IPS5 has already significantly limited what we can do, and moving toward an even more restrictive architecture will only make it harder to develop fully integrated applications.

APIs, webhooks, and iFrames are useful, but they simply can’t replace the flexibility and freedom we used to have as developers.

I believe this will ultimately and definitively mark the end of the third-party developer community.

We can't not use modern technologies because of that, though.

There are agencies that do a lot of work for Salesforce and other apps via APIs and embedded content, but it's all hypothetical right now. No one internally has even thought about v6. Our focus is to modernise the tech stack in place as much as possible and expand the API to make it more useful.