Concepts

Vendo is a platform for shipping open-source SaaS tools to non-technical tenants. The pages in this section explain the moving parts you'll touch as a tool author — what the platform considers a tool, how credentials and providers are brokered, how state changes reach your code, and how errors are surfaced.

Read these first if you are new to Vendo. Each page focuses on one mental model; together they cover the platform's contract with your tool.

What's in this section

• What is a tool — The catalog entry tenants install. The three tool types (deployment, downloadable, npm) and how to pick one.
• Two modes — OSS/BYOK mode vs Vendo mode. Same SDK; the mode is selected by whether VENDO_API_KEY is set.
• Multi-tenant — How Vendo isolates tenants at the database (RLS), the network (subdomain), the binding trigger, and the proxy auth layer.
• Request scoping — forRequest / forUser for per-end-user identity inside advanced Vendo deployments.
• Connections and integrations — The relationship between an integration (provider catalog), a connection (tenant credential), and a binding (one-per-app routing).
• The proxy and credentials — Why your tool hits {provider}-proxy.vendo.run instead of the provider directly, and how the credentials worker refreshes OAuth tokens.
• Credits and billing — The prepaid credit model, what your tool can read at runtime, and what suspension looks like.
• Events — SSE stream of connection and billing changes for real-time UI.
• Webhooks — HMAC-SHA256 verification of inbound Vendo webhooks.
• Errors — The canonical Vendo-Error-Code values and their typed-class mappings.

For the implementation walkthrough see Build a tool. For exact method signatures and HTTP shapes see Reference.