Using RAD
This is the shared overview for everyone who uses RAD. It covers signing in, finding your way around, the roles, and the core concepts (modules, deployments, credits, billing, and getting help). Each role guide links back here for the basics, then focuses on what that role does.
What is RAD
RAD (Rapid Application Deployment) is a web portal for deploying ready-made Google Cloud modules without writing any infrastructure code. You pick a module, fill in a guided configuration form, and the platform provisions it on Google Cloud for you.
Usage is metered in credits: most modules cost a set number of credits to deploy, and your balance is checked before a deployment runs.
Signing in
- Open the RAD sign-in page and click Sign in with Google. Google is the only way to sign in.
- Choose your Google account.
The first time you sign in, your account is created automatically — there is no separate sign-up page: signing up and signing in are the same button on /signin, and any page you open while signed out sends you there. New accounts start with the User role and are active right away. You are asked to accept the platform terms before the console opens; that acceptance is recorded against your account, and you are asked again if the terms are later updated. Declining leaves you signed out rather than trapped — Sign out stays available on that screen.
Where you land depends on your role. Admins open on Users and Finance on Billing, because each signs in to do a particular job; so do Support and Agent accounts that hold no other role, on Help and on Credits → My Commission respectively. A support operator or agent who is also a user, trainer or partner lands like one. Users and trainers open on Solutions: on Build Solution with AI if you have access to it — purchased credits, from a subscription or a top-up — otherwise on Solution Catalog → RAD modules. An agent who is also a user or trainer lands the same way. Partners always have access, so they open on Build Solution with AI. If you pressed Deploy on a module in the public catalogue on the sign-in page before signing in, you land on that module instead, ready to deploy. (If the platform is running in private mode, only people who already have a RAD account can sign in — new self-registration is turned off, so ask an administrator to create your account if you can't get in.)
To sign out, open the profile dropdown in the top-right corner and choose Sign Out.
Language
RAD is available in English and French. Choose your language from the language selector in the top bar — it is also on the sign-in and pricing pages. RAD reloads the page you are on in that language and remembers the choice, so refreshing a page or following a link keeps it. Module, solution and plan descriptions, the Conversational Assistant and the emails RAD sends you all follow it: emails are written in the language you last used in the console.
Finding your way around
The top navigation bar shows only the items relevant to your role (or roles). Wherever you are, you'll find:
- A profile dropdown (top-right) with Your Profile and Sign Out.
- A language selector in the top bar, beside the light/dark theme control.
- Ask AI in the top bar (in the menu on a phone): ask RAD's AI assistant about modules, pricing or deployments in plain language. It is also on the sign-in, pricing and guide pages. Its answers can be wrong, so check anything important; each time you open it, the conversation starts afresh.
- Pricing, just before Help in the top navigation — RAD's prices, shown inside the console.
- In the footer: Contact Us (to the Help page), Feedback (RAD's public feedback board, at fider.radmodules.dev, where you can suggest and vote on improvements), the Terms and Privacy documents, Cookie settings, and Pricing again.
There is no separate combined dashboard — each item in the top nav is its own page.
After you sign in, RAD takes you to the page that fits your role:
- User, Trainer → Solutions, on Build Solution with AI with purchased credits, otherwise on Solution Catalog → RAD modules
- Partner → Solutions, on Build Solution with AI
- Admin → Users
- Finance → Billing
- Agent → Credits, on the My Commission tab — unless you are also a user or trainer, in which case you land as they do
- Support → Help — unless you are also a user, trainer or partner, in which case you land as they do
- No role assigned yet → Help
Roles at a glance
You can hold more than one role at once (for example Agent and Partner), and a Partner is always also a User. Roles are granted by an administrator.
| Role | What they do | Where they start |
|---|---|---|
| User | Browse the catalog, deploy and manage their own modules, manage their credits | Solutions |
| Admin | Everything a user can do, plus full platform administration: users, settings, modules, and oversight | Users |
| Partner | A user who also publishes their own modules and earns revenue from them | Solutions |
| Agent | A sales role: earns a cash commission on the module fees that users they referred pay with purchased credits | Credits → My Commission (Solutions if also a User or Trainer) |
| Finance | Financial reporting and payouts: subscription tiers, credit settings and grants, event codes, revenue, invoices; read-only lab oversight | Billing |
| Support | Triages support tickets; sees deployments for the customers whose open tickets are assigned to them | Help |
| Trainer | Runs lab sessions from Solutions → Managed Environments — one lab environment per participant — and manages the environments they provisioned; also has everything a User has | Solutions |
See the role guides at the end for the full task lists.
Core concepts
The module catalog (Solutions → Solution Catalog → RAD modules)
RAD modules, on the Solution Catalog tab of Solutions, is the module catalog. Each module appears as a card showing its description, a documentation link, an average star rating, how many times it has been deployed, and its price: the one-off fee plus an estimate of the build, shown the same way on every catalogue card.
There are two kinds of modules:
- Platform modules — published by RAD.
- Partner modules — published by partners.
If you're a partner you'll see two tabs (your own Partner modules and Platform modules, which also includes other partners' public modules). Everyone else sees a single combined catalog of public modules.
You can pin the modules you use most so they stay at the top, search by name, filter by category from the list beside the grid, and page through the catalog. A stats strip at the top shows total deployments, your credit balance (when credits are enabled), and how long deployment history is kept.
Deploying a module
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Click a module card, then choose how to configure it. The Conversational Assistant is the default for anyone with purchased credits (partners always); without them the Configuration Form is the default and the assistant is shown but locked until you buy credits. The Configuration Form is the guided, multi-step form — fill in the fields, using Next to move through the steps. The Conversational Assistant describes every setting in one message and proposes changes as you describe what you want; you apply each proposed change yourself, so nothing is set without your say-so. You can switch between the two at any point, and both write the same configuration.
Two things the assistant deliberately will not do. It never sees or sets a secret (an API key, token or password): it tells you the field exists and you type the value into the highlighted box on the page — never into the chat, where it would be sent to the model and kept in the conversation. And it will not accept a value that breaks a field's own rule; it tells you what the rule is and asks for a corrected one rather than quietly changing what you typed. The same goes for a region a RAD-managed project cannot use: it says so and lists the regions that are allowed.
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The form opens with a What will be deployed panel listing everything the deployment builds — in a RAD-managed project, the Google Cloud project and shared services as well as the app — and whether each is created, updated first, or already exists and is reused for free. A confirmation dialog appears if the module costs credits, has dependencies, or needs special permissions.
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Click Deploy Module. The deployment is queued and provisioned, and RAD opens the new deployment's own page on its Build Status tab so you can watch it run. If you don't have enough credits, RAD shows the module's cost against your balance and prompts you to top up.
Basic and advanced are about which settings you can reach, not what you pay. A new deployment is always created with the essential settings only, and is charged the module's fee as described under Credits. The full set of settings — advanced mode — is offered only when you update a deployment, and an update never charges a module fee.
On the Deployments page each row shows the module, the deployment ID, an editable star rating, when it was created, how long it took, the status, and the action. There's no project or credits column — open a deployment for its project, and its Builds tab for what each build consumed. Admins and support see an extra column for who deployed it. Admins can switch between All deployments and My deployments; support has no switch and sees only the deployments of the customers whose open tickets are assigned to them, not the whole platform; everyone else sees their own. A Deleted deployment stays listed only for someone who can still purge it (or, for support, restore it) — for example, a lab participant does not see the environments their trainer has torn down.
Click a deployment to open its details, which has three tabs:
- Outputs — the non-sensitive results (such as URLs and endpoints), shown once the deployment succeeds and has outputs to show.
- Build Status — live logs as the deployment runs. Once it succeeds, Explain this opens a plain-English summary of what was created in your Google Cloud project; on a step that failed, RAD explains the cause when it recognises it, Suggest fixes offers AI-suggested causes and steps when it does not (and, where a simple setting change would help, Apply suggested fix opens the update form with it filled in for you to review), and Search for a fix and Ask for help both work from the error that step printed. See When a deployment fails. Download saves the whole log as a text file, with secrets masked.
- Builds — the build history for that deployment.
From the details view you can:
- Update — re-open the configuration form (pre-filled) and re-apply changes. Available once a deployment has finished.
- Delete — choose Delete to tear down the cloud resources, or Purge to remove the deployment from RAD without destroying the cloud resources (useful when a deployment is stuck or was changed outside RAD). A deployment that belongs to a solution can be deleted or purged only from the solution's page. A RAD-managed GCP project ("GCP Project on RAD") is torn down the same way, but because that takes the whole project with it, RAD refuses while any other deployment is still running in that project and lists the ones to delete first. Google keeps a deleted project recoverable for about 30 days. Google Cloud's terms do not guarantee that a restored project will be usable, so a restore cannot be relied on to get a deleted project back: take appropriate backups of your data and configuration before you delete, and if a restore fails, redeploy the application and restore its configuration from those backups.
- Cancel — releases a deployment that is still Queued or Waiting and has not started building, or a purge that has stalled.
- Check status — offered when a deployment has shown Queued, Pending, Working or Deleting for 30 minutes with nothing changing. RAD asks Cloud Build whether a build is still running; if none is, the status is corrected so you can delete or update it, and if one is, it tells you when it will finish. See When a deployment seems stuck.
Deployment statuses you may see include Queued, Pending, Working, Waiting (on a prerequisite deployment to finish), Success, Failure, Internal Error, Deleting, Deleted, Cancelled, Timeout, and Expire.
Solutions
Solutions holds everything you can deploy, on two tabs — and it is where users, partners and trainers land after signing in (see Signing in). After those two tabs comes Managed Environments: client projects while the platform offers them (see the Client Projects Guide) and, for trainers, finance and admins, lab sessions while they are enabled. Its All view lists both; the Lab sessions and Client projects views each have their own create button (New lab session, New client project) for those allowed to create one.
- Build Solution with AI — answer four plain questions and RAD works out which applications deliver what you described, prices the whole thing and estimates how long it takes. Build this saves it as one of your solutions and opens it ready to deploy. Start here if you know what you want to achieve but not what it is called. It is also reachable directly at /build. It needs purchased credits (partners always have access); without them the tab shows what it does, locked, with a Buy credits button while the platform is selling credits.
- Solution Catalog — everything ready to deploy, with a type filter across the top (All · My solutions · RAD solutions · RAD modules) and a New solution button beside it that opens Build Solution with AI. All shows every kind on one page, each under its own heading, leaving out any kind with nothing to show; the category list beside the grid appears only when a single type (RAD solutions or RAD modules) is selected, because solutions and modules use different categories. The search box above the tabs searches the whole Solution Catalog, and your query stays in place as you switch types.
- My solutions — bundles you composed yourself. Describe what you want to build, and RAD suggests modules from the catalog with a short reason for each. Add the ones you want, name it, and save. Your custom solutions are private to you, show Draft until deployed and Deployed afterwards, and deploy through exactly the same pipeline as a RAD solution. Where two members have no known connection between them, RAD says so on the card rather than guessing.
- RAD solutions — ready-made bundles of modules curated by RAD, grouped into categories. Each card shows a combined credit cost and an average rating derived from the modules it contains.
- RAD modules — the module catalog described above.
A solution's modules are grouped into waves, a rough deploy order — but what actually gates a member's start is its real configuration dependency on another member: it waits only for that specific producer to finish, not for its whole nominal wave, so members frequently provision concurrently both within and across waves. Provisioning a solution walks you through a single configuration form covering its members. The resulting solution deployment gets its own details page, where — as with a module deployment — you can update, delete, or purge it.
Credits
Usage is metered in credits, held in four separate balances:
- Awards — free credits (signup, monthly, referral), reset each month.
- Event credits — free credits claimed with a code from a RAD partner event. They expire on their own date.
- Subscription — credits from a subscription plan. Where the platform is set to reset them, a renewal replaces the allowance rather than adding to it.
- Top-up — credits bought outright as a one-off. These never expire.
Spending draws on awards first, then event credits, then subscription, then top-up, so the credits that expire soonest go first. Your balance is all of them together and is checked before each deployment.
Deploying a module costs that module's fee plus a build cost. The fee is reserved when you confirm and charged when the deployment first succeeds; the build cost is metered from how long each build actually runs and charged once it finishes — so the final figure can differ a little from the estimate in the confirmation dialog. That dialog quotes the WHOLE chain — deploying into a RAD-managed project also creates your private Google Cloud project and the shared services your applications use, and both are listed with the total. If the build cost exceeds your balance, the remainder carries over and is settled from your next purchase. A partner deploying their own module isn't charged the module cost, but does pay the build cost. An update charges the build cost only. If RAD's finance team has set a VAT rate for your account, it is added to every module fee, build cost and project usage charge, the confirmation dialog shows it as its own VAT line, and it must be paid from purchased credits. A solution of three or more modules gets a bundle discount on its module fees — by default 15% for three or four, 20% for five or six, 25% for seven or more.
You choose which emails RAD sends on your Profile page. Turning Deployments emails off stops every deployment email, including the warning RAD sends before it permanently deletes something — so while they are off, those deletions are held rather than made without warning. See the User Guide.
What a failed deployment costs is a platform setting, not a fixed rule: Finance can choose, separately for the build cost and the module fee, whether either is charged when a new deployment fails or is cancelled. In the current release neither is charged, so a failed deployment costs you nothing. Failed updates and teardowns are not charged either.
The Credits page has:
- A Credit Transactions tab — your full history of awards, purchases, and spend, filterable by deployment and date, with Export CSV.
- A Subscriptions tab and a Buy Credits tab — shown only while the platform is selling credits (see below).
- A Linked Projects tab — have RAD pay Google for a Google Cloud project you already own (see Costs and invoices).
- Depending on your role, revenue tabs — My Commission (agents), Module Revenue (partners), My Referral Revenue (admins and finance) — sit here too. There is no separate Revenue page.
- A Calculate ROI tab, always last — the calculator described below.
To buy credits, choose a currency and amount, pick a payment provider, and complete checkout on the provider's secure page. Your credits are added automatically once the payment confirms.
Some platforms require purchased credits (not just awarded ones) for certain deployments — the confirmation dialog will tell you when that applies.
Billing and subscriptions
Payments are handled through Stripe and Flutterwave. You choose the provider at checkout; which ones are available depends on your currency and what the platform has enabled. Pricing is shown in your selected currency.
Subscriptions are optional recurring plans ("tiers") that grant a set number of credits each billing cycle. You can subscribe, and cancel or reinstate at any time, but you can hold only one subscription at a time — to move to a different tier, or a different payment provider, cancel the current one first. Subscriptions only grant credits — they do not grant the Partner role, which an administrator assigns manually.
Whether anything can be bought at all is one platform switch, Enable Subscription. While it is off there are no new subscriptions and no one-off top-ups on either provider: the Subscriptions and Buy Credits tabs are not shown and the public pricing page lists no plans. If you already hold a subscription, a notice on Credit Transactions still lets you cancel it.
ROI
The Calculate ROI tab on the Credits page is an interactive estimator. It comes pre-filled with your recent activity and lets you adjust assumptions (such as monthly deployments, manual deployment time, engineer hourly cost, and time-savings percentage) to estimate your labour cost, platform cost, net savings, and ROI. It's an estimator only — it doesn't deploy or charge anything.
Costs and invoices
You can see your own spending on the Credits page, two ways. Credit Transactions lists every award, purchase and charge on your account. Project Transactions — shown whenever project credits are enabled — breaks the project side of that down per Google Cloud project, with the credits debited and the underlying cloud cost for each, over a date range you choose. It exists because a project charge reaches the ledger as one combined row covering all your projects at once.
Linked Projects, also on the Credits page, lets RAD pay Google for a Google Cloud project you already own and run yourself. You prove you own the project, grant RAD's billing identity two roles that let it attach or detach a billing account (and nothing else — RAD gets no access to your data), cap the project's Gemini API and GPU quotas, and send a request. Once RAD's finance team approves it, RAD pays Google and debits your purchased credits hourly for the project's usage, at Google's list price plus RAD's margin, plus your VAT rate. You must keep a minimum balance of purchased credits; below it, RAD pauses the project by detaching billing (your data is kept) and resumes it when you top up, emailing you before it pauses. You can stop at any time with Stop, or by linking your own billing account to the project. See the User Guide.
Platform-wide reporting stays an administrator and finance view: the Module Costs and Project Invoices tabs on the Credits page, and the whole Billing page, are limited to those two roles. If you need a formal invoice, ask through the Support form.
Getting help
The Help page's Send Message tab is a contact form that raises a support ticket and emails the support team. Raising a ticket needs purchased credits (a subscription or a top-up) while credits are on sale, and you can raise up to 5 in 24 hours. The My Tickets tab beside it lists the tickets you have raised, newest first, with where each one stands (New, In progress, Resolved or Closed) — sending a ticket takes you there, so you see the one you just raised. Depending on your role you may see more tabs: Setup Requests (admin and finance) and Support Tickets (admin, support, and finance). (Administrators see a message form on Send Message instead of the contact form, and have no My Tickets tab.)
Your referral link is on your Profile, in the Refer and earn section — open the profile menu at the top right. It is shown whenever the referral program is on, including when referrals are unlimited (it is never shown to administrators), and the Credits page has a Referral link button that takes you there. Everyone who signs up through your link is linked to your account.
You can also reach Help from the Contact Us link in the footer. To suggest an improvement rather than report a problem, use the Feedback link beside it.
Role guides
For the full set of tasks in each role:
Need RAD to do something it does not do yet? Request it on the roadmap, or vote on what is already there.