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 with a 30-day free trial on the demo tier - up to 10 products and 1,000 active devices, no credit card required. The licenses are issued by the production service, and activation and validation behave exactly like paid licenses, so you can integrate the SDK end-to-end before subscribing. When the trial ends without a plan, nothing is removed and existing activations keep validating; creating licenses or products and activating new devices resumes once you subscribe (console → Settings → Plan & usage). Need more time? Write to support and we will extend the trial.

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)

For a trial that anyone can start, build a trial key into your application. Each machine that runs it gets its own trial period, 30 days by default, counted from that machine's first activation, and the customer types nothing. The automatic trials guide covers the console setup, the code, and the limits.

When you would rather hand out trials one evaluator at a time, two other models remain:

• A short-lived key per evaluator: an order whose license terms have a short duration (say, 14 days) emails the evaluator a key whose license expires on its own. Its clock starts when the license is created, not at the first run. Your app sees EXPIRED at the end, and you show the purchase path from there.
• A free first period: model the product as a subscription whose first period is free, and let payment state do the work.

Whichever model you choose, 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.