# Test keys: integrate without spending a cent

> Every account now has an sk_test_ key. Requests are validated, priced and answered like real ones, webhooks fire, nothing is sent.

Published 2026-05-06 by SMSMeteor API team.

Integrating a messaging API used to mean sending yourself forty text messages. Every account now has a test key, prefixed `sk_test_`, next to its live keys.



## What a test request does

Everything except the last step. The number is normalised, the destination resolved, the sender rule applied, the text encoded and segmented, the price computed from the live rate card. The response is the real response, with `"status": "test"`. Nothing is handed to a carrier and nothing is debited.



## Webhooks too

Test messages emit webhooks to your endpoints, signed like real ones, walking through `message.sent` and `message.delivered` a second apart. Numbers ending in 0001 to 0004 simulate failed, expired, rejected and a slow delivery, so you can exercise every branch of your handler.



## What it does not do

It does not tell you whether a real message will be delivered; only a carrier can. When the integration works, switch the key and send one real message to yourself. That is the whole go-live procedure.

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Source: https://smsmeteor.com/blog/test-keys-integrate-without-spending (HTML). Generated by SMSMeteor from the same data as the page. Summary of the whole site: https://smsmeteor.com/llms.txt