Articles on: Workspace & integrations

Try things out in the Sandbox

The Sandbox lets you try things out safely before you show them to real clients. It is a second, completely separate workspace, with its own address and its own data, and nothing you do there reaches your clients. You open it from Sandbox at the bottom of the sidebar, next to Settings and Help.

Select Sandbox at the bottom of the sidebar.
Check the address: it is your workspace name on zendo-sandbox.site, not your usual address.
Sign in with the email address that is already filled in and the generated password shown on the screen. You can change the password later.
Build what you want to test, and go through it the way your client would.

What you can test

The Sandbox is a full workspace, not a preview, so you can go through whole flows that are hard to test safely in your real workspace:

A purchase. Create a service and buy it yourself, including the Order Form, the payment method and whatever the service does after the purchase. A card payment can be tested with a Stripe test account, as described below. See Decide what happens after a purchase.
An automation in action. Create a request, change its status and check that the messages arrive. See Automate a request type.
An invitation. Add a client, invite them, accept the invitation and look around their client portal.
A form with form logic. Fill it in the way a client would, rather than in the form builder's preview. See Show or hide form fields with form logic.
A new request type, with its statuses and automations, before any client sees it.
A theme or a sidebar layout, the way a client will see it.

Test card payments with a Stripe test account

In the Sandbox, Stripe is connected in test mode. Clients pay with Stripe's test cards, no money is charged, and the payments appear only in your Stripe test data, never in your live Stripe balance. This makes it possible to go through a whole card checkout, including what Zendo does after the payment, before a real client pays you.

In the Sandbox, open Settings › Sales › Payments & documents, go to the Payment methods tab and connect Stripe. The connection in the Sandbox is separate from the one in your real workspace. See Connect Stripe.
Create a service and tick Stripe in the Payment method list in its Finance settings.
Create a test client with an email address you own, invite them and accept the invitation. Emails sent from the Sandbox reach real inboxes, so do not use your real clients' addresses.
As that client, buy the service and pay with one of the test cards below.
Back on your side, open the order and check its payment status, the invoice and the request, if the service creates one.

Stripe's test cards accept any future expiry date, any three-digit CVC and any postal code:

Card number	What happens
`4242 4242 4242 4242`	The payment succeeds.
`4000 0025 0000 3155`	The bank asks the client to confirm the payment (3D Secure) before it succeeds.
`4000 0000 0000 9995`	The payment is declined because of insufficient funds.

Stripe's full list of test cards, including other countries and other kinds of failure, is in Stripe's documentation under "Testing". A real card does not work with a test connection, and a test card does not work in your real workspace.

Purge workspace data in the Sandbox also removes the Stripe connection on the Zendo side. To remove it in Stripe as well, disconnect the Zendo app in your Stripe account.

An unused Sandbox is deleted after seven days

The whole Sandbox is deleted after seven days without activity. When you need it again, select Sandbox and Zendo builds a new, empty one.

Nothing moves between the Sandbox and your workspace

The Sandbox does not contain your clients, services, request types, themes, sidebars, dashboards or history. Nothing is copied between the two workspaces, and nothing can be exported from one to the other. Whatever you build in the Sandbox has to be built again in your real workspace, so the Sandbox is for practising, not for preparing work to move over later.

Seeing what a real client sees

The Sandbox cannot show you what your real clients see. To see a particular client's portal as it is right now, with their own content and the theme, sidebar and dashboard assigned to them, use View as client in your real workspace. See View the portal as a client.

To check a theme, a sidebar or a dashboard before you publish it, use Live preview in its editor. The Sandbox is for going through a purchase, an invitation or an automation from start to finish.

Updated on: 09/11/2026

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