Sandbox and trials

Three different things in the product get called a trial. This page explains each one and when to use it.

The demo tier (your evaluation of the service)

A fresh live tenant starts on the demo tier - free and currently without usage limits. The licenses are issued by the production service, and activation and validation behave exactly like paid licenses. The demo tier exists so you can integrate the SDK end-to-end before subscribing. Every paid plan then starts with a 14-day free trial (console → Settings → Plan & Usage).

The sandbox (your playground)

The sandbox is a separate console origin, linked from the live console's navigation, with seedable sample data and its own keys. Sandbox license keys are SBX-prefixed, and licenses issued there carry a sandbox marker your code can read: is_sandbox() natively, IsSandbox in .NET.

Use the marker to gate convenience, not security. Showing a "SANDBOX" watermark or enabling test-only behavior is a reasonable use; treating "not sandbox" as proof of payment is not, because the access decision should always come from the validation status. Nothing in the sandbox touches your live tenant, so it is a good place for destructive experiments, demo videos, and CI runs against a disposable tenant.

Product trials (your customers evaluating your software)

There is no separate trial API. A trial is a licensing decision you model with templates:

• Short-lived template: a "Trial - 14 days" template whose licenses expire on their own. Your app sees EXPIRED at the end, and you show the purchase path from there. Hardware binding means the same machine cannot loop trials by reinstalling, because the license, not the installation, carries the clock.
• Trial-then-buy on one key: issue from a trial template, and on purchase, issue the paid license and have the app swap keys, or model it as a subscription whose first period is free and let payment state do the work.

Give the trial the same activation path used by paying customers, rather than a separate code path reserved for evaluation. That way your trial exercises the same code your paying customers run.