Demo mode

Demo mode fills a new workspace with example content and switches payments onto a test rail, so you can book a stay as a guest and watch it arrive in your console. Nothing on the go-live checklist has to be answered first.

It exists because the checklist asks fourteen questions and only four of them actually block anything. Demo mode is the answer to “can I see this working before I spend an afternoon on it?”

Start it

On the Go live page — where a new workspace lands — the first card offers it. One click:

• Example content goes in: a furnished, priced, photographed example listing, a small catalog of amenities and attributes, a published About page and a headline on your homepage.
• Test payments go on, and become your default payment method.
• Your storefront opens in a new tab.

You can only start a demo while your storefront is unpublished. On a published workspace the offer is not shown, because starting one would take your live site off the air.

Your storefront is private while it runs

This is the trade, and it is what makes demo mode safe: while test payments are on, your public storefront serves nobody. Anyone with your address sees a maintenance page.

You still reach it yourself — the Open storefront button hands your browser a preview pass that lifts every gate, including the review Reynt is doing on your workspace. That is why you should follow the link from the console rather than typing your address in.

The round trip

This is the part worth doing, and it takes about two minutes:

1. Book a stay on your own storefront, as a guest would. Use your own name and email — nothing here reaches a real person.
2. Come back to the console. The bell in the top bar has a new entry: your booking request. Click it.
3. Publish the request. It becomes a booking, with a payment attached. (If you switched your booking flow to instant, there is no request to publish — it is already a booking.)
4. Open the checkout from the booking’s payment card, and pay it. The test rail settles with one click and moves no money.
5. Look at what changed — the payment timeline, the invoice, the calendar, the dashboard. All of it is the real machinery; only the money is missing.

While your workspace is waiting for Reynt’s review, emails are held — so the booking confirmation and the “pay now” link do not land in your inbox during the demo. Everything above is reachable from the console instead.

While it runs, the checklist changes one step

Set up how you get paid is replaced by Leave demo mode to go live. That is deliberate: the test rail is not a payment method a real guest can use, so the payment question genuinely cannot be answered while the demo is on. It comes back — unanswered — the moment you leave.

Leaving

Leaving is always possible, and it is a step on the go-live checklist. It:

• switches test payments off,
• restores the payment method you had before (or the first one you have enabled, if that one is no longer available),
• stops holding your storefront back — the remaining go-live steps still apply.

The example content stays. It is yours now: rename the example listing into your own property, rewrite the About page, or delete them. Reynt cannot tell an example you have edited from a listing you wrote, which is exactly why it never deletes them for you.

Demo mode is a one-time decision. Once you leave, you cannot start another one — the examples cannot be added twice, so a second demo would only take your storefront dark again. If you want a genuinely empty workspace afterwards, use Settings → Identity → Reset workspace, which deletes content but keeps your settings.

Demo mode and your free trial are different things

Your 14-day free trial runs from the day you signed up, and it keeps running during a demo. Leaving demo mode early does not shorten it, and staying in one does not extend it — you keep whatever time is left either way, and you can go live with it.