Sandbox, live, and the environment toggle
Why the same page shows different things depending on one control in the sidebar
Your organization has two environments and they are genuinely separate. Sandbox is where you and your developers test, using magic values that produce whatever outcome you ask for. Live is real people submitting real documents.
Nothing crosses between them. A sandbox verification is never billed, never reaches the fraud network, and never appears in a live list. A key made for one does not work in the other.
The toggle in the sidebar
The environment control sits in the bottom of the sidebar, and it has three positions.
| Position | What you are looking at |
|---|---|
| Sandbox | Test traffic only |
| Live | Real applicants only |
| All environments | Both at once, with a badge on each row telling you which is which |
If you can open both, the console starts in All environments. That is on purpose. A view of one environment cannot tell you it is incomplete, and a team running a split integration can lose track of half its traffic with nothing to notice.
Writing while you are looking at both
Reading both at once is easy. Creating something is not, because a new flow, API key or webhook endpoint has to belong to one environment or the other, and in the combined view there is nothing to infer it from.
So the console asks. Create a flow while you are in All environments and the dialog makes you choose where it is built. The server refuses a write that names no environment rather than guessing, which is why there is no way to accidentally mint a live key while you thought you were testing.
What belongs to an environment
A flow belongs to one environment for its whole life. You do not move it; you promote it, with Copy to live, which creates a separate live copy and leaves the sandbox flow exactly as it was. Later edits to the sandbox original do not follow. The copy does not become your default until you make it one.
Webhook endpoints are the same: the environment is fixed when the endpoint is registered and cannot be changed afterwards. API keys carry it in the key itself. Verifications, deliveries and usage each carry the environment of the traffic that produced them.
Who can open which
Access to an environment is a property of your seat, set by an owner on the Team page. A member can hold sandbox only, live only, or both.
This is the only thing that gates real applicant data. There is no separate approval, no waiting room, and no "request go-live" step: an organization is live from the moment it is created, and what decides whether a particular colleague sees real people is their seat.
If the toggle will not move to live, your seat does not include it, and an owner can grant it in a few seconds.
Sandbox is somewhere you switch into, not somewhere you start
It is not a trial. Use it whenever you want to rehearse a change: build the flow there, run test sessions through it, then copy it to live when it does what you want.
Pages that behave differently in sandbox
Persons is empty in sandbox. Person records are built from real activity and the fraud network covers live traffic only, so there is nothing to show until you switch to live.
Usage counts sandbox traffic but never bills it, so it lands on the non-billable side of the split.
Analytics will happily chart test traffic, which is worth remembering before you read anything into an automation rate produced by magic values.