Your first number in 60 seconds.

Before you start

The Mepa8 start checklist is the shortest path from nothing to a monitored vendor. You need an email address you can open right now and one vendor you pay for by usage. ElevenLabs, Neon and Railway each have a connect page with the exact key steps; the rest of this page assumes one of those three. Time budget: 60 seconds for steps 1 to 3, under 10 minutes for all 7.

The checklist

1. Sign in with a magic link. Type your email on the app's sign-in page and open the message that arrives. The link is single-use and expires 15 minutes after it was sent. There is no password to create. If the email has not arrived in 2 minutes, check spam and request another; the earlier link is void the moment a new one is issued.
2. Paste one read-only key. Press Add vendor, choose the vendor, and paste the key you created on that vendor's connect page. Mepa8 shows only the last 4 characters after you save, and no API ever returns the key again. If the key fails the first check you see the vendor's own error text, not a generic one.
3. See a real number. The first check runs the moment the key is saved, usually inside 10 seconds. The vendor's row shows cost to date where the API reports it, usage against the limit, and a health dot. That row is the activation event: your account is now monitored.
4. Set a budget. Open the row and type the monthly figure you expect, in dollars. The bar fills against it and the on-pace figure appears after the second check. A budget a fifth above your real expectation gives one week of signal before the first warning.
5. Add an alert channel. Email is on from sign-in. Add a mobile number on the Alerts page when SMS is available in your region; the page says which channels are live today. Critical alerts go to every channel, warnings only to email unless you say otherwise.
6. Send a test alert. Press Test on the Alerts page. A real message with a fake critical event lands in each channel within 1 minute. If it does not, nothing real will either, which is the whole point of the test.
7. Run a kill drill. Open the vendor, press Kill, read the blast radius, and stop at the confirm screen. You have now seen exactly what a real kill asks of you, and the drill is written to the audit log as a drill, not a kill.

What good looks like at the end

On our own board the first connection, ElevenLabs, returned 4,091,604 credits used of 3,831,927 on the first check on October 8, 2026, which was the overage we had been missing for a month. That is what a first number is for. It should tell you something you did not know, and on a healthy account it tells you that you are at 31% with 19 days to the reset, which is also worth knowing.

“The first number should tell you something you did not know.”Mepa8 docs, 2026-10-09

If a step fails

• No magic-link email. Check spam, then request a new link. Links are sent from a verified domain with DKIM and SPF; a corporate filter that still blocks it can allowlist the sender shown on the sign-in page.
• Key rejected. The error is the vendor's own. The usual causes are a key without the read scope the connect page names, a key from the wrong workspace, or trailing whitespace from a copy. Create a fresh key rather than editing the old one.
• Number looks wrong. Compare it with the vendor's own dashboard on the same day. Mepa8 shows what the API returned and the time it returned it; the connect pages say which fields each figure comes from.
• Still stuck. Ask the assistant in the app; it has read all 8 docs pages and will quote the one you need. For the two-person-company version of stuck, there is the vendor audit.

Time-to-first-value is the one onboarding metric that predicts retention, and top self-serve products get there in under 5 minutes according to Userpilot's 2026 funnel guide. We built this checklist so that step 3 is the only one that matters, and it is the one the product does for you.

Questions people ask

Straight answers

Do I have to finish all seven steps?

No. Steps 1 to 3 give you a monitored vendor with email alerts on your sign-in address. Steps 4 to 7 add a budget, a second channel, proof the channel works and a rehearsed kill. Most people finish all 7 in under 10 minutes; the board shows which are done.

Can I connect more than one vendor?

Yes. Repeat step 2 for each. The free tier covers 3 vendors as of October 9, 2026; the pricing page lists the limits for Pro and Team. Each vendor gets its own budget, alerts and kill recipe.

What does the kill drill actually do?

It opens the real two-step flow, shows the real blast radius for that vendor, issues a real single-use token, and stops before confirm. The audit log records it as a drill with your name and the time, and nothing at the vendor changes.

Sources

1. Userpilot — SaaS user onboarding funnel (time-to-first-value) — read 2026-10-09
2. ElevenLabs — get user subscription — the endpoint behind the first number for ElevenLabs

Change log: October 9, 2026 — First published with the free tier opening.