I have a temporary staging environment that can't use a free development license. Do I need to buy an extra license?

Generally, yes, but there are exceptions.

• If you expect the temporary staging environment to be shut down shortly (e.g. in less than two weeks), you can ignore the license issue. The unlicensed extras will continue to work, but they will show a big red license warning and you may notice a performance hit in the manager as the license check runs on every request. Please let us know when the temporary environment is shut down, so we can close the license issues for you.
• If the production environment is not yet licensed (e.g. you're working on a completely new site), you can assign the license you've bought for production to the staging environment. When you go live, you'll receive another license email that will allow you to transfer the license from staging to production.

If you need the staging environment to be available for the long term, we'd strongly recommend to pick a domain for it that allows free development licenses, so that you do not run into any license related issues at all.