(Single-tenant restriction issue) Test Teams bot with external users without publishing to store

Hey everyone!

So I'm working on a Teams bot and just hit a pretty frustrating roadblock. Microsoft recently changed Teams bots from multi-tenant to single-tenant apps, and now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to test the bot with users outside my org.

The problem:

• Building a Teams bot that needs testing with external users (clients, beta testers, etc.)
• Can't publish to the Teams store yet because it's still in development
• The single-tenant restriction means I can't just share the app manifest like before

What I've tried:

• Side-loading only works within our tenant
• Guest users in our org is not an option because the bot needs access to user email and calendar to work properly; guest users would not have access to their own inbox

My questions:

1. Is there any way to share/test a Teams bot with external users without going through the full store publication process?
2. Are there any workarounds you guys have found for cross-tenant testing during development?
3. Does Microsoft have any beta testing or sandbox options I'm missing?

I really don't want to publish a half-baked app to the store just for testing, but I also need real users from different orgs to test the functionality. This seems like a common dev scenario, so I'm hoping someone here has cracked this already.

Any help would be super appreciated! Even if you just point me to the right docs or share what worked for you. Thanks in advance! 🙏