docs/ZELLO-SETUP-GUIDE.md may be stale: developers.zello.com login broken, Consumer API access unclear

[rjonesbsink]

Summary

docs/ZELLO-SETUP-GUIDE.md documents getting Zello Channel API credentials (Issuer + Private Key) via a free, self-serve Zello Consumer account at developers.zello.com (section 4, "Get the Channels API credentials"). While setting this up on a fresh install, we ran into signs that this portal may no longer be actively maintained or may no longer serve Consumer accounts the way the guide describes — worth someone with a Zello account verifying and updating the guide if it's changed.

This is a "please verify" report, not a confirmed break — I couldn't get far enough to conclusively confirm whether Consumer-tier key generation still works, for reasons below.

What we observed

1. developers.zello.com login is currently broken with a reCAPTCHA error (ERROR for site owner: Invalid site key). Browser console shows:

   TypeError: grecaptcha.render is not a function
       at t.value (https://developers.zello.com/static/js/main.b35d0b0d.js:1:550288)
   

   This looks like the page's own JS calling grecaptcha.render() before Google's reCAPTCHA script finishes loading — a bug on Zello's side, reproduced in a clean browser session (no extensions/cache/cookies), so not environment-specific. This alone blocks the guide's step 3 (sign in to the developer console).

2. The page footer reads © 2022 Zello Inc. — suggesting this portal hasn't been touched in a while.

3. zello.com/developers (Zello's current developer marketing page) now reads entirely as an enterprise sales funnel for the Mobile SDK and Management API — "Let's talk," business-email contact form, no visible self-serve signup path. This is a different flow than the Consumer/free path the guide describes.

4. However, the official zelloptt/zello-channel-api GitHub repo's AUTH.md still documents developers.zello.com/keys → "Click Keys and Add Key" as the current key-generation mechanism, and doesn't call out any Consumer-tier restriction. So it's genuinely unclear whether:

   • Consumer accounts can still self-serve generate keys once past the (currently broken) login, or
   • Zello has quietly moved free/Consumer channel API access behind a Work subscription and just hasn't updated AUTH.md to say so.

Suggested action

Someone with a working Zello Consumer account should:

1. Try logging in to developers.zello.com (may need a few reload attempts given the reCAPTCHA race condition above, or Zello may fix it independently).
2. Check whether the /keys page for a Consumer-tier channel still allows free self-serve Issuer/Private Key generation, or whether it now prompts for a Work upgrade / sales contact.

If the flow has changed, docs/ZELLO-SETUP-GUIDE.md section 4 (and the "Zello Consumer (free, 1 channel)" Service Type option referenced in section 5 / the Settings UI) would need an update — either updated steps, or a callout that Consumer self-serve access has changed and what the current path is.

Not something we can fix from the TicketsCAD side (it's entirely dependent on Zello's own product/portal), but flagging so the docs stay accurate for the next person setting this up.

[ejosterberg]

Thank you for this — a "please verify, here's exactly what I saw and what I couldn't determine" report is genuinely more useful than a confident wrong one, and the distinction you drew between the four observations is the right one.

I re-checked developers.zello.com just now. Partial results:

Your observation 2 is confirmed. The footer still reads © 2022 Zello Inc.

Your observation 1 is not reproducing at the moment. The login form opens for me, and inspecting the page state gives:

grecaptcha loaded:        object
grecaptcha.render is fn:  true
"ERROR for site owner":   not present

That is consistent with your own diagnosis rather than contradicting it — you identified it as a load-order race between the page's JS and Google's script, and a race is exactly the kind of thing that resolves on some loads and not others. So the honest status is "intermittent," not "fixed" and not "broken." Anyone hitting it should reload a few times before concluding they're blocked. Worth noting the login modal still offers "Don't have an account yet? Create one!", so the self-serve signup path has not been removed.

Your observation 4 is the one that actually matters and I can't settle it. Whether a Consumer-tier account can still generate an Issuer + Private Key at /keys for free requires being logged in with such an account, and I'm not going to guess at it — that is precisely the question that would make the guide wrong, and it deserves a real answer rather than an inference from the marketing pages.

So: leaving this open and tagging it as a docs-verification task rather than closing it. Eric has a Zello account and can check the /keys page directly; once he does, docs/ZELLO-SETUP-GUIDE.md section 4 gets either a confirmation or a rewrite, and this issue gets the answer.

In the meantime I'll add a short note to the top of that guide saying the developer portal login is known to be flaky and to retry, so the next person doesn't conclude their setup is broken. You're right that the portal itself isn't something we can fix from here — but "the docs told me to go to a page that appeared broken, and nothing warned me" is fixable, and that part is on us.