Inside the Buildgrain demo workspace
What actually happens when you sign in at demo.buildgrain.com: template cloning, owner access, and the nightly reset that keeps the demo honest.
The app at demo.buildgrain.com is not a video and not a click-through mockup. It is the kit itself, running in demo mode against a real Postgres database.
Your own workspace, ready on first sign-in
When you sign in with Google for the first time, the kit clones the northwind-labs template into a private workspace and assigns you the owner role. You inherit the template owner's seat, so the work assigned to it becomes yours: the dashboard opens with your tasks, your notification digest, the mail delivery log, and the workspace files already in place — not with eight empty-state cards.
Concurrent visitors never see each other's workspaces. The same tenant isolation rules that ship in the kit apply to the demo.
No charge path, by construction
The demo never asks anyone for money, and there is no surface through which it could. Plan & access switches the plan key and re-syncs entitlements against the local catalog; the billing provider slot stays unconnected unless a buyer configures Stripe in their own deployment. The boundary holds because those surfaces are not implemented and a copy scan in CI keeps them from creeping back — not because a badge says so.
The nightly reset
Three protected template accounts are restored to their seeded state every night. Visitor workspaces are removed 24 hours after their last activity. That is why the demo always looks freshly seeded: it is.
Why this matters
A starter kit is judged by what it does under a real session, not by its screenshots. Open the app, create a project, complete a task, switch a plan — then open the admin console and watch the same data appear in the cross-account registry.