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Demo mode fills your organization with a realistic sample account, so you can explore Meridian, or show it to someone, without touching anything real. While it is on, everyone in the organization sees the same sample data and nobody can change anything. It is built for two situations: looking around a populated account before you have connected a real app, and demoing the product to your own team or to a customer with no risk to live data.

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Turning it on

Demo mode lives in Organization settings, under Demo mode. The owner can turn it on, and so can any team member whose role holds the Demo mode: Manage permission. See Permissions for the full catalog and Roles and permissions for how to grant it. Meridian staff can also turn it on for you if you ask, which is the usual route before a guided demo. Confirming locks the organization straight away, then Meridian prepares the sample data in the background. A banner shows the progress while that runs.
Preparing the sample account usually takes about a minute. The organization is locked from the moment you confirm, not from the moment the data is ready.

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What changes while it is on

Three sample applications appear. They are deliberately different sizes: one large and healthy, one mid-sized with some churn and trials, one small and sparse. Each comes with stores, subscriptions, transactions, plans and features, usage events, segments, custom fields, automations, emails, discounts, deployments, security scans, reports and notifications, so every part of the product has something to show. Your real applications are hidden. They are not changed or deleted, only put out of reach: they disappear from the app switcher, from global search and from the organization home, and a bookmarked link to one returns a not-found page until demo mode is off. Downloads are the one exception: an organization data export or a database backup that was already made can still be downloaded, since it is your own data leaving Meridian. Starting a new export waits until demo mode is off. Every action is disabled, for every member, whatever their role. Creating, editing, deleting, deploying, connecting Shopify or GitHub, inviting people: all of it is refused while demo mode is on, and the page tells you why. Organization pages about your own team stay real and read-only, so members, roles, invitations and billing still show your own account rather than sample data. A banner sits on every page saying the account is in demo mode. Anyone who can manage demo mode gets a Turn off demo mode button in it. Pages outside your plan still work. The sample applications are fully entitled, so nothing is locked behind a plan while you explore. A page that your own subscription does not include shows a banner naming the plan that does include it, so you can tell apart what you are seeing from what you have bought.

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Turning it off

Go back to Organization settings → Demo mode and choose Turn off demo mode. Confirming deletes the three sample applications and every row that belongs to them: stores, contacts, subscriptions, transactions, plans, features, usage events, segments, custom fields, automations and their runs, emails, discounts, webhook deliveries, deployments, security scans, custom domains, reports and notifications. Nothing that existed before demo mode was turned on is touched. The clean-up also runs in the background. Your organization stays locked and your real applications stay hidden until it finishes, and then everything is exactly as you left it.
Last modified on September 29, 2026