Preview the customer portal in Console

You can set up a customer portal directly from the Seam Console. These Console-generated portals are intended as an API exploration playground — they let you preview how portals work and experiment with the API before building your integration.

1. Open the Customer Portals page

From the Console, navigate to Developer → Customer Portals from the top navigation bar.

2. Select your business verticals

Choose the vertical that best matches your product (for example, Short Term Rental). This setting does two things:

1. Preconfigures recommended defaults for your use case.

2. Updates the labels in the portal UI so they use industry-specific terms your customers expect.

For example:

• In the Hospitality vertical, the generic Seam concept of a Space appears in the portal as a Room.

• In Multi-family, Spaces appear as Units.

• In Gym Management, they appear as Facilities.

Here's a complete reference of how Seam concepts map to industry-specific labels across verticals:

3. Configure portal features

Under Portal Configuration, select which features to enable:

• Connect – allow customers to connect their device accounts.

• Organize – let customers map devices to rental units, rooms, or spaces.

• Manage Devices – give customers tools to manage devices, troubleshoot, and view logs.

• Configure – allow customers to set automation rules and customize Instant Key branding.

4. Enter your customer_key

Add the customer_key for the customer this portal belongs to. Seam uses this key to scope the portal to only that customer’s devices and accounts.

5. (Optional) Set up Spaces

This step is required only if you enable the Organize feature.

• Spaces represent the real-world units your customer manages—for example, Room 101 in a hotel, Unit A in an apartment building, or Studio 3 in a gym.

• Create a Space for each unit your customer manages.

• Use a space_key that matches your own system’s identifier (for example, room-101-id).

6. Generate the portal

Click Create Portal. Seam generates a temporary portal URL you can use to preview the portal.

Next step: Generate portals programmatically with the API

In production, portals must be generated with the API so that they can be refreshed whenever a customer needs access. On the next page, we’ll cover how to create portals programmatically using the create_portal endpoint.