Sandbox vs Live

Updated October 30, 2026 2 min read

Testing safely#

Paddle’s sandbox is a separate account with its own products, prices, tokens and notifications. Nothing in sandbox charges real cards.

Keep Active Environment on Sandbox while you build your pricing page and test the purchase flow.
Products and pricing packages you create while Sandbox is active are created in your sandbox Paddle account. Their pro_… and pri_… IDs only exist there.
Buy buttons use the active environment’s client token, so a pri_… from sandbox will not work after switching to Live.

Going live#

Create the same products and pricing packages in Paddle live. The simplest way is to switch Active Environment to Live, save, and then create the products and packages again from the License Cart dashboard so the live pro_…/pri_… IDs are stored.
Register the webhook URL in your live Paddle account and paste its secret into Live Webhook Secret.
Update the price_id in your [lc_buy_button] shortcodes to the live pri_… IDs.
Make one real purchase and refund it in Paddle to confirm the live chain.

If live credentials are saved while the environment is still Sandbox, License Cart shows an admin notice: “Paddle is set to Sandbox but live credentials are saved. Checkout buttons use the sandbox account until you switch the environment to Live.” Live webhooks are still verified thanks to the secret fallback, but checkout and product sync use sandbox until you switch.

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