Publishing allows you to sell your app, or even entire projects, to other professionals. Publishing is optional.
Activating apps requires an Afterpattern subscription. However, you can activate apps for free if you publish that app (or the project that contains that app) such that other professionals can duplicate it for free from the Afterpattern marketplace. We call this an "open" app or project, as in open source. This is not only the most affordable way to use Afterpattern, but it's also the best way to contribute to our growing community of legal automation builders.
Publishing is useful if you want to sell your project or individual app as a whole; meaning, you want to give others access to your app's code, allowing them to make edits as they see fit. If you simply want to sell access to your app or project, consider using a payment block inside your app, or creating a portal where others can make accounts and use your apps and view / edit their data.
You can publish an entire project or individual apps.
If you publish an entire project, you're allowing others to duplicate the apps, database schema, and portal configurations contained in that project. The database will be empty; publishing does not share any data saved in your database.
The processing for publishing is the same whether its an entire project or an individual app. Start by clicking on the publish tab.
The marketing page is used to describe your project or app. When you explore the Afterpattern marketplace, you are browsing marketing pages.
After you draft a marketing page, under the "Publication status" tab, select "Marketplace":
You can publish to multiple marketplaces at once. By default, the Afterpattern marketplace is selected. This is a public marketplace that anyone can access. You can also create your own marketplace.
Next, select the permissions you are granting others. There are two options:
Publishing an app as "open" means allowing anyone else to duplicate it for free. You're effectively making your app open source (though not technically, since someone will always need Afterpattern to edit the app).
If you publish your app as open, activating it does not count towards the number of activated apps allowed under your Afterpattern subscription.
Continuing from the instructions above under 'How to publish', you can publish your app as open by (a) selecting a public marketplace as the publication destination (e.g. the Afterpattern marketplace); and then (b) making the cost for duplicating the app/project $0.00.
No.
Even if you publish a project with a database, you will not be giving others access to your data (when they duplicate your project, they will receive an empty database).
