# Overview

### What is the Developer Portal?

The developer portal is an online dashboard where the cloud services behind your coherence-based game can be managed. It can be found at <https://dev.coherence.io> or from the **Developer Portal** link above.

The developer portal includes:

* Organization and Project creation and management
* Resource configuration and management
* Enabling / disabling features
* Cost analysis
* Team management

Here are some examples of tasks to perform on the developer portal:

* Create your organization and project for your game
* Start/stop/restart your cloud-based **replication server** or **simulator**
* Enable coherence features such as **player authentication, key-value store, persistence,** and **build sharing**
* Invite teammates to your project
* View your resource usage and billing forecasts

### Is the Developer Portal required for development?

While a local **replication server** is available as part of the Unity SDK, in order host the multiplayer services like the **replication server** in the cloud, your team must have a project in the Developer Portal. It is up to your project needs when to begin using the cloud services.

### Getting started

Please see the page, [Create a free account](https://docs.coherence.io/0.7.4/get-started/create-an-account), in the Get Started section.