Building an App with someone else

You can invite someone to build an App with you. They get everything up to the Draft — the private copy of your App you both build and test against: its code and files, its brief and design, its own data, pages, features and automations. What stays yours is everything that touches the outside world, your wallet, or your users: publishing, spending money, the App's money, its secrets, your account links, its people's passwords, and the live data your App's own users have put into it.

Everything on this page is specific to Apps. For images, videos, audio, documents and 3D models, collaboration works the same way for both people.

Invite someone

Open your App and choose File, then Share, then Collaborate:

• Enter the person's email.
• Choose Read or Edit. Read is the default.
• Choose Send invite. You'll see Invite sent.

The email doesn't have to belong to a MotherFluxer account yet. If it doesn't, the person is invited anyway and signs up with that email to accept. Either way they get an email with a link, and they have no access until they open it and accept.

The invite email says what they're getting, so an Edit invite doesn't arrive looking like a handover of the whole App.

What an Edit collaborator can do

An accepted Edit collaborator can do everything that stops at the Draft:

• Develop — write the brief and install features in About, change the design in Format, and write the App's code and files in Code.
• Data — add lists and change their shape, and add, edit and delete records in the Draft's data. Their Records always show Draft, and their imports and exports work on the Draft too. Until the Draft has data of its own, Records says so and there is nothing for them to open.
• Manage — see where the Draft and Live stand in Publish, discard the Draft's changes, set who may open each page in Pages, change sign-in and groups in Users — a group with a price included: its name, what it includes and its limits, and see the people who have signed up, with their email addresses partly hidden, giving or taking the groups you hand out to the Draft's people.
• Equip — set up the App's assistant (what it says, its model and limits) and its documents, write emails and the rules that send them, and write, test and schedule actions. In Connect they see each of the App's Variables by name: one you have set reads Set by the owner, and one still missing reads Setup needed — never what it is for, or which of your keys or accounts it reads.
• Manage's second row — everything except Money: the App's traffic, its alerts, and what's failing in Health, and arranging the Traffic and Health dashboards — though a figure of their own that reads your Live records says Live data is the owner’s.
• File — save named versions, and restore an older version's code into the Draft. Restoring a version's saved data is yours alone, so a collaborator's restore offers Code only.

Their changes reach the Draft as they save, just as yours do.

What only you can do

These stay with you as the App's owner, and a collaborator doesn't see the controls for them at all — they aren't shown greyed out, they're simply not there:

• Publishing — publishing, unpublishing, making Live match an older version, and changing the App's address.
• Spending your money — its private database, Background power, buying or connecting a domain, and turning on Saving for its data.
• Money — Payments, prices that are on sale (a collaborator can edit a group that has a price, but not its prices, and can't delete it), turning the App's assistant on and setting its Budget (a collaborator sees them as values), what the assistant has spent, and Money on Manage.
• Secrets — your vault: adding a key or a data link, and choosing which key, connected account or data link each of the App's variables reads. A collaborator never sees your vault, and never which of your other Apps a list is shared with. Also yours: replacing the assistant's connection key, the database connection, Query (the direct console that runs as the App's own database credential), and each Webhook action's address, which anyone holding it can use to fire that action.
• Connecting accounts — connecting, updating or disconnecting the App's email account, texts, Slack and outside services. A collaborator sees which account is connected, and nothing more. When a collaborator asks the building assistant to wire up an outside service, it can write the code, but it can't store that service's key or your own sign-in app for it — it tells them to ask you to connect it.
• Your account links, like GitHub.
• Your App's people — searching them, their full email addresses, resetting a password, and deleting an account. Deleting closes a person's account for good and erases everything they saved, in the live App and in the Draft alike.
• Your App's live data — the Live records your App's own users have put into it, Copy live, which copies them into the Draft, and who is in a group on your Live App (a group with a price is what someone paid for). A collaborator works in the Draft and never sees the live records.
• Deciding who else is let in — only you can invite, change someone's access, or remove them.

If a collaborator tries to reach one of these another way, it's refused. The controls being absent is the honest version of the same answer.

What a Read collaborator gets

Read access lets someone open the App and look at everything an Edit collaborator can see — the code, the Draft's data, the pages, the design, the monitoring — without changing any of it. It suits a reviewer or a client who should follow along. If they try to save something, they're told they have read-only access and can ask you for Edit.

You can switch someone between Read and Edit at any time from the menu on their row under Collaborate, and the change takes effect immediately.

The App stays yours

Inviting someone shares access; it doesn't transfer ownership. The App, its version history, its live site, its data and its bills all stay under your account. There is no second owner, and ownership can't be handed over.

Because of that, anything a collaborator does that has a cost or a consequence outside the Draft runs as you — and that's exactly why those actions are yours alone to start.

Stop collaborating

In File › Share › Collaborate, open the menu on the person's row, choose Revoke access, and confirm. You'll see Collaboration revoked and they lose access immediately. Everything they built stays — their saved versions remain in the App's history, and removing them doesn't undo any of their work.