Environments

Environments separate your API usage across the stages of your development workflow: keys, blocklists, webhooks, and logs are scoped to an environment, so testing never disturbs your production setup.

The three environments

• Production: your live, customer-facing application
• Staging: pre-production testing
• Development: local development and testing

Each API key belongs to exactly one environment, and every request made with that key is associated with it. You never specify the environment in a request; the key determines it.

All three environments use the same production API infrastructure and draw on the same monthly quota. Environments provide organizational separation, not infrastructure separation.

What is separated

Setting	Scope
Blocklist entries	Per environment
Gates and their rules	Per environment
Webhook subscriptions and their configuration	Per environment
Usage analytics and logs	Per environment
API keys	Per environment
API endpoints and response data	Shared
Monthly credit quota	Shared
Rate limit counters	Shared
Plan features	Shared

Two consequences are worth calling out. A domain added to your blocklist with a development key has no effect on production traffic, and a domain blocklisted in production has none on development. And because webhook subscriptions are per environment, each one can point somewhere different: production at your live system, development at a local tunnel or testing tool.

A gate is scoped the same way. A key only sees gates in its own environment, so calling a production gate with a development key returns 404 gate_not_found.

Creating an environment-specific key

In your UserCheck dashboard:

1. Go to API Keys
2. Click Create New Key
3. Set the Name (e.g., "My App")
4. Select the Environment
5. Save the key