Feature Suggestion: 'Development mode' for licensed sites

Apologies if this has been discussed before, I've done a search and not found anything.

I work at a small agency and we currently have the Small Business plan. We're nearing our limit of live sites running formidable but still have a few builds to go until we upgrade - trying to hold out until absolutely necessary.

Because of our development cycle (develop locally > create client accessible staging site > publish live site) we often end up getting three iterations of the same site clogging up our list of activated licenses and have to manage these regularly.

It's not a big issue for us to do this, but it strikes me that it might be good for members on the limited subscriptions if we were able to start a site in 'development mode' and later switch to live mode, so as not to go over our license limit.

You might need to limit the functionality in order to make sure users do not abuse this system, but on thinking about this it could be a challenge. Limiting the number of submissions per month could be one way, but small sites would never go over the limit and would be able to stay in development mode theoretically forever. Limiting page views might be another approach where the submission is deactivated by the JS after your api detects the domain has had over X view in a given month. Another option might be adding random text into entries to make them more or less useless on a production site, while still allowing the testing of API integrations and emails etc. Anyway - if you like the idea I'll leave you guys to figure out the best way!