Experimental features
Chargetrip introduces significant new capabilities through a structured experimental program. It gives you early access to evaluate upcoming features and influence their design before schemas and contracts become permanent.
Types of experimental features
- New operations: Entirely new queries, mutations, or subscriptions.
- Extensions to existing operations: New optional arguments or output fields added to existing stable operations.
Experimental feature phases
| Dimension | Alpha | Beta |
|---|---|---|
| Production readiness | Strictly not recommended for production environments. | Suitable for controlled pilots. Not recommended for mission-critical flows. |
| Activation | Disabled by default. Requires explicit opt-in in the Dashboard. | Enabled by default for all clients. |
| Stability | Stable but subject to frequent schema changes. | Stable. Can have minor schema changes. |
| Schema indicator | Tagged with [ALPHA] in schema field descriptions. | Tagged with [BETA] in schema field descriptions. |
| Discontinuation notice | None. Subject to immediate modification or retirement. | Proactive direct outreach to actively integrating customers. |
For what stable features guarantee, see API lifecycle.
Best practices
- Use alpha features for sandbox evaluation, proofs of concept, and feedback. If you ship one anyway, you receive no notice or compatibility protection when it changes.
- If you expose beta capabilities to end users, show a “beta” badge so they know the capability is still stabilizing.
Graduation lifecycle
- Alpha to Beta
When the functionality and schema achieve enough maturity, the feature is graduated to beta. The description tag updates from
[ALPHA]to[BETA], access is enabled by default for all customers, and changes are announced in the Release Notes. - Beta to Stable
When reliability and maturity are validated across multiple clients, the
[BETA]description tag and runtime warnings are removed and the feature graduates to the stable lifecycle.
Pricing
- Requests to operations tagged as experimental are free of charge.
- Requests made to stable endpoints that include optional experimental input arguments or output fields are charged in accordance with your subscription plan.
Programmatic warnings
To keep your development team aware of experimental dependencies in active traffic, API responses using alpha or beta capabilities return warning metadata in the GraphQL extensions block:
Example warning of an alpha feature
Example warning of a beta feature
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