Becoming a Developer

Before you can publish extensions on the Imperal Marketplace, you need a developer profile. Registration is annual — pick a tier, pay the yearly token fee (or start free on explorer), claim a unique nickname.

The 60-second version

1. Open Imperal Panel → Developer Portal → Become a Developer
2. Pick a tier — explorer (free) / indie (9k tok/year) / studio (29k tok/year)
3. Pick a nickname — 3-30 chars, lowercase, a-z 0-9 underscore hyphen, unique across the platform
4. Confirm — if you picked a paid tier, tokens deduct from your wallet for the first year

You're now a developer. Create your first app → see Quick Start.

What you get for paying

See Developer Tiers for break-even math and renewal details.

Why pay at all?

Three reasons to pay annually for indie/studio/partner instead of staying on explorer:

1. Higher % of every action call — indie keeps 10 more percentage points than explorer. On a 5-token action that's 0.5 extra tokens to you. Sounds tiny — but at 600 calls/day for 30 days that's 9,000 extra tokens, exactly recovering your indie subscription cost in the first month.
2. Multiple apps — explorer caps at 1 active app. If you want to ship a suite (mail + notes + tasks), you need indie or higher.
3. Withdraw to USD — explorer-tier earnings accrue but you can't cash out. To actually receive dollars in your bank account, you need to be on indie or above + have Stripe Connect verified.

The nickname

Required + unique + permanent (mostly). Format: 3-30 characters, must start and end with a-z or 0-9, can contain - and _ in the middle. Examples: alex, my_tools, bob-builds.

Reserved nicknames (you can't take these): admin, imperal, support, system, webbee, root, and a few others.

You can rarely change your nickname — contact Dev Portal support if needed. URLs (imperal.io/dev/your-nick) and historic transaction records reference your nickname, so changes ripple.

How to register via API

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $YOUR_JWT" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"tier": "indie", "nickname": "alexbuilds"}' \
  https://auth.imperal.io/v1/developer/register

Response:

{
  "tier": "indie",
  "nickname": "alexbuilds",
  "registered_at": "2026-05-12T15:30:00Z"
}

The 9,000-token first-year fee is deducted from your wallet as part of this call.

Annual renewal — auto vs manual

Auto-renew is enabled by default. Each year on developer_registered_at + 365d, web-kernel deducts the current tier's annual price from your wallet.

• If you have enough tokens → renewal succeeds, you stay at the same tier for another year. Audit row in token_ledger with reason='tier_renewal'.
• If your wallet can't cover the renewal:
  • Web-kernel attempts auto-topup (if you've enabled it under Settings → Auto Top-Up)
  • On auto-topup failure: you receive a Panel notification 7 days before lapse, then on lapse you drop to explorer tier
  • Existing earnings remain claimable (your earned balance doesn't vanish)
  • Your published apps stay live but you immediately lose multi-app + payout privileges

Re-upgrade any time to restore the previous tier.

Cancelling

Dev Portal → Settings → Tier → Cancel auto-renew. Your tier stays active until the current annual period ends, then drops to explorer. No refunds for unused months.

Already a developer — change nickname or tier

What if I never publish anything?

You paid for the tier but didn't ship any apps. Tier stays valid until period end; you can publish at any moment. No automatic refund, but you can manually request one via support if the period is mostly unused (Imperal admin reviews case-by-case).