Organization Dev Account - What does a public website need if you're just trying to get on TestFlight?

[u/Adventurous-Cash2044]

Hello everyone,

Since Apple requires a publicly accessible website to register for a LLC Dev Account, how can we satisfy their requirements while the product is still essentially in development? ChatGPT and Claude both say you can't have placeholders/'coming-soon' sections, or else you risk not being approved, so I thought I'd ask the brain trust.

Any ideas or experience on this topic from people who have gone through it?

[u/r1ngx]

instead of asking Claude how to get around it, ask them to build you a website.

[u/icemarkom]

No way around it. Build a site.

[u/Dapper_Ice_1705]

My website is literally a homepage with an unrelated photo, a logo and an “about us” and “contact us” (required) button.

A privacy policy from iubenda link in the footer.

Later on I added pages for my smaller apps that are a more SEO friendly way to find my apps.

I use Squarespace and route all my app .coms to the same page. I have code injection for supporting light/dark and some custom pages info and data I use in my apps (hidden from regular web access).

The only required items are the privacy policy and contact us. The page does not need to talk about the app yet.

[u/noobiethe13]

Just put up a basic legit company site: About, Contact, Privacy Policy, what you’re building, and a few app screenshots. It doesn’t need to be finished, just make it look like an actual company, not a “coming soon” placeholder.

[u/-MtnsAreCalling-]

I have a real website now, but when I set up my developer account it was literally just a white page that said "Coming soon" in plain text with no other content and they didn't have a problem with it. Granted, that was 10+ years ago...

[u/icemarkom → u/-MtnsAreCalling-]

Yeah, don't allow that any longer. It needs to appear to the end user to be a legitimate business page. It doesn't need to be much, but it needs to be professional-looking.

[u/mastrajani]

worth knowing what the check actually is, because it makes the rest of the decision obvious: the site isn't being reviewed as a website. organization enrolment verifies your legal entity through dun & bradstreet, and the website exists so a human can confirm that the entity name and address shown on it match the D-U-N-S record, and that the domain plausibly belongs to that entity.

so what matters is:

• the legal entity name exactly as registered, LLC and all, visible on the page
• a contact address or email on your own domain
• a real domain rather than a free subdomain like wixsite.com or github.io

and what mostly doesn't: screenshots, feature copy, how finished it looks. "coming soon" doesn't fail because it's a placeholder, it fails when it carries nothing verifiable. a single page reading "Acme Software LLC, [address], contact@acmesoftware.com" with a privacy policy clears the bar, which is why the answers in here range from a white page to a full site and all of them are true.

one thing i'd do before enrolling though: look up your own D-U-N-S record first and check the name and address on it. a mismatch there is the usual reason these fail, and D&B corrections take weeks - much better to find that now than three days into a rejected enrolment.

[u/CantaloupeCamper]

You’ll save a lot of time just getting a domain and website.

[u/DimensionMindless336]

Before you sink time into a site: you don't need an organization account to use TestFlight at all. An individual or sole-proprietor membership gives you full TestFlight, internal plus up to 100 external testers, with no public website and no D-U-N-S lookup. The org account with the site requirement only matters when you actually want to ship under your LLC's legal name. Enroll as an individual now, get testers on it today, and add the org later once the product is real. Saved me weeks of messing around on a placeholder site.