Extending with connectors

A space stands on its own, but it rarely lives entirely alone — it needs to send email, take a payment, translate a page, or pull in an external data source. A connector is the bridge from your space to one of those outside services. You install it, give it credentials, and switch it on; from then on the space can use that capability.

One connector per category

Connectors are grouped into categories — a category is what the connector is for, not which vendor provides it. The rule that keeps this clean: a space runs at most one connector per category at a time. One email provider, one payment provider, one AI provider — not a pile of competing ones.

That single rule is what spares you vendor lock-in. The work a space does names the category (“send via Email”), never the vendor, so switching the email connector from one provider to another changes the bridge while everything that crosses it keeps working untouched.

The categories a space can fill:

AI · Email · Payments · Storage · Notifications · Authentication · Translation · Feed

Feed is the odd one out: it’s one-directional, mirroring an external open-data source into the space (a WFS or REST feed) rather than reaching out to a service. Image and Monitoring are reserved — the category exists but no connector fills it yet — and Geo (map tooling) is planned as its own category.

Your plan decides what you can switch on

Connectors are gated in two steps. First, a plan has to allow connectors at all — it’s a feature a plan either includes or it doesn’t, and without it a space sees no connectors whatsoever (custom plans included). On the standard plans that feature switches on at the professional tier. Second, among the connectors an allowing plan offers, each one declares a minimum tier, so a higher plan unlocks more of them. Both gates trace back to Limits and features — connectors are one of the capabilities a plan grants.

Turning one on

A connector moves through a simple, owner-driven lifecycle from the management interface:

install  →  configure  →  activate  →  deactivate

You install the connector, configure it (its API key or credentials), activate it — at which point it becomes the active connector for its category — and deactivate it when you’re done or switching providers. Credentials are stored server-side with the space’s settings; they’re never exposed to a template or a visitor.

Where the technical detail lives

This page is the owner’s view: what a connector is, the one-per-category rule, and how a plan gates them. How connectors are built and called — the operation that says “send via Email”, the connector kinds, webhooks — is a developer concern, covered in Automation & connectors. And one capability that builds directly on an active connector — automating work through the Space Wizard — is the next page.