Neon Law Foundation | The external surface — every third party, in one place

The external surface — every third party, in one place

Neon Law Navigator's whole external surface is six services, in two kinds — platform services (the cloud the stack runs on) and feature vendors (each lights up one capability and stubs out cleanly when unconfigured):

Service	What it gives you	Kind	At boot
Google Cloud	Storage, Cloud SQL, OIDC, archive	platform	required — provisioned by `navigator gcp setup`
Restate Cloud	Durable workflow execution (`workflows-service`)	platform	required — the workflow broker
Vertex AI	The A2A agent-router LLM (Gemini Flash in prod)	platform	optional — `NullRouter` until configured
DocuSign	E-signature	feature	stubs until `DOCUSIGN_*` is set
Xero	Accounting / billing (`ACCREC` invoices)	feature	stubs until `XERO_*` is set
SendGrid	Outbound + inbound email	feature	stubs until `SENDGRID_*` is set

Presenter notes

The full catalog, with env prefixes and the per-environment account rule, is docs/third-party-integrations.md — the table above is the deployer's-eye view of it. Two things worth saying out loud for a copyist:

It boots empty. You need none of the feature vendors to stand the platform up. Any vendor you leave unconfigured falls back to an in-process stub that makes no external calls, so a fresh deploy serves the portal, the per-matter git repositories, and the document surfaces on nothing but Postgres and storage. Wire a real vendor only when you want that feature. (Locally, the platform services have stand-ins too — fake-gcs-server, in-cluster Postgres, the KIND Restate Operator — so the whole stack runs with no cloud account at all.)
One vendor account per environment. When you wire a feature vendor, use a separate account per environment — a free sandbox for dev and CI, a production account only in prod — so test data never lands in your real books or in front of a real signer. That convention, and the "one app, two environments" model that keeps tests off your production envelope quota, lives in docs/third-party-integrations.md and docs/docusign-esignature.md.

One boundary worth naming: Xero reconciles against the firm's bank (Mercury) inside Xero — Neon Law Navigator never speaks to Mercury. Our only integration edge is the Xero API. That is the shape to copy: integrate the system of record, not everything it in turn connects to.

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