Activate your license on a domain ending in .local.test, or .localhost,extensions reserved for local development environments (RFC 2606/6761, used by WAMP, Laravel Valet, or MAMP),and this activation will never count toward your license’s paid activation quota, even on a Pro tier limited to a single active site. None of these extensions are publicly routable: you cannot use them to run a real e-commerce site in place of a production domain, which prevents abuse of the mechanism.
Development activations are still capped, however, at a multiple of your license’s paid quota rather than a fixed number identical for everyone: three times the number of sites included in your plan. A Pro license (1 paid site) can therefore cover up to 3 development domains simultaneously, an Ultimate license (4 sites) up to 12, and a Business license (100 sites) up to 300,enough to test a new store in each environment (local, staging, acceptance) without ever having to free up an existing activation.
These test activations remain clearly visible in your customer dashboard: each development domain is marked with a “Test” badge in your license’s activation table, so you’ll never confuse them with a real production activation when cleaning up. The recommended workflow is simple: first install and activate the plugin on your local or acceptance testing environment, verify that the layout, presets, and watermark match your expectations for your theme and catalog, then activate the same key on the final production domain,this second activation will consume one of your quota slots.