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Paige Dev is a WhatsApp number Paige shares with everyone, so you can test your bot on real WhatsApp before you have a number of your own. Link your phone to it and message it, and your project’s bot answers — same as a customer would experience, without a customer being involved. Everything you send runs against your preview copy, so test bookings and test contacts never touch your live data.
1

Open Settings → Project

In your project, go to the Settings tab and select the Project section. Find the card headed Paige Dev — test on your phone.
2

Enter your number

Pick your country, type your phone number, and click Link phone.
3

Message Paige Dev

Open WhatsApp on your phone and message the Paige Dev number. Your bot answers.
A number can only be linked to one project at a time, and a project can only have one linked number. Both of those are movable rather than blocking — see When someone else has it linked.
The Share Your WhatsApp card just above has a Paige Dev tab with a QR code and a wa.me link. That’s for opening a chat with the test number quickly — scanning it doesn’t link your phone. Linking only happens by entering your number on the Paige Dev card.

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Send test messages

Once your number is linked, message the Paige Dev number from WhatsApp. The message runs through your bot code in real time — you’ll get a response just as any user would. The card also gives you Clear test data to wipe what your testing has accumulated, and Unlink when you’re finished.

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Try a test template on your linked phone

Once you’ve linked a phone, the Paige Dev card has a Try now button (tooltip: Try it on your phone). Click it and Paige delivers a pre-built Meta template — with an embedded flow-trigger button — straight to your linked WhatsApp number, so you can verify template rendering and flow buttons end-to-end without doing a full deploy.
  • The send is rate-limited to 5 per number per rolling 24 hours. If you hit it you’ll see Rate limit reached — try again in a few hours.
  • If the test template hasn’t been configured on your environment, the button shows a clear error instead of failing silently.
Use Try now when you want to confirm that a flow opens correctly from a tappable button — it bypasses the need to start an outbound conversation manually.

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Linking is visible to your team

This is worth knowing before you link a personal number: the link belongs to the project, not to you privately. Anyone with access to the project sees that it’s linked, which teammate linked it (by email), and a masked version of the number — +27 ••• •• 1234. If you’d rather not have your personal number visible to everyone in the workspace, that’s the trade-off to weigh.

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When someone else has it linked

A project only holds one link at a time, so if a teammate is already testing, you’ll see their email on the card and a Take over button instead of Link phone. Taking over unlinks their number and links yours — they aren’t asked first, so it’s worth a message. The same applies in reverse to your own number across projects. A number lives on one project at a time, so linking a number you’ve already used elsewhere offers to Move it here, unlinking it from the other project. There’s also a Move here shortcut for pulling across a number you’ve linked before.

Test the happy path

Walk through the primary use case your bot is designed for to confirm the core flow works end to end.

Test edge cases

Send unexpected inputs — empty messages, long strings, emojis, or out-of-order replies — to see how your bot handles them.

Check conversation state

If your bot stores state between messages (for example, multi-step flows), test that the state carries over correctly across multiple turns.

Use logs alongside testing

Open the Logs panel while testing to see console.log output from your bot code in real time. See Execution logs for details.

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Programmatic testing with the Code Agent

If you’re working with the Code Agent to build or modify your bot, you can ask it to run a simulated test. The agent sends a message to your bot programmatically and observes the response — without you needing to pick up your phone. To trigger a programmatic test, describe the scenario you want to test in the chat. For example:
“Test what happens when a user sends ‘hello’ as their first message.”
The agent will run the test, show you the result, and can iterate on your code based on what it finds.
Programmatic testing is especially useful for regression checks — ask the agent to re-run the same test after making code changes to confirm nothing broke.
When you’re done testing, click Unlink on the Paige Dev card in Settings → Project. Your bot carries on serving real users exactly as before — only your test link is removed.
Messages you send while linked are processed as real bot interactions and recorded in your preview data and logs. They don’t reach your live bot or your real customers, but they aren’t invisible either — a teammate reading the preview logs will see them.