The Mepa8 vendor catalog is the list of metered services a small AI shop pays for, each with a connector, a budget and a written kill recipe. Ours holds 21 vendors as of October 9, 2026, because that is what our own companies pay for. A catalog that claims "any vendor" is really saying you will do the wiring yourself. This one says which vendors work in 60 seconds, and how much of the work is still a human step.
The three tiers
Full means cost, health and limits come from the vendor's API, the kill is an API call, and the restore has been proven on our own account. Four vendors are Full today: ElevenLabs, Neon, Railway and Cloudflare.
Watched means cost and health come from the API every run, but the kill is a documented click in the vendor's dashboard. The card states the blast radius, so you know what stops before you click. HeyGen and Vonage are Watched, which is 2 of the 21.
Manual means the vendor has no billing API we have been able to use. Cost comes from the receipt in the billing inbox, the kill steps are written on the card, and the vendor still has a budget and still raises alerts. It is 15 of the 21 today. That number is the honest measure of how much work is left.
The entry rule
A vendor moves up a tier only when a live test passes. The test is the same every time: pull real cost from a real account, propose a kill, confirm it with a single-use token, then restore and prove the vendor is back. The rule was written into our own blueprint before the first outside customer:
“A vendor enters the catalog only when a live test returns real cost from a real account and a kill was proven reversible.”Mepa8 blueprint, October 8, 2026
That is why the Full tier is short. ElevenLabs earned it the hard way, after its plan credits ran to 106% of the limit on one of our accounts in September 2026. The incident write-ups hold the numbers for each one.
The 21 vendors on our board
Vonage
Tier: Watched
Anthropic
Tier: Manual
Google AI
Tier: Manual
Twilio
Tier: Manual
Resend
Tier: Manual
Stripe
Tier: Manual
Clerk
Tier: Manual
Google Workspace
Tier: Manual
Meta
Tier: Manual
Artemis
Tier: Manual
Airtable
Tier: Manual
SimpleTexting
Tier: Manual
Vercel
Tier: Manual
GitHub
Tier: Manual
Tebra
Tier: Manual
Proton
Tier: Manual
Vendors we are adding next
The AI-builder stack is maybe 25 vendors, and they are the same 25 everywhere. Not yet in the catalog: Anthropic and OpenAI by usage API, Google AI, OpenRouter, Deepgram, Twilio, Vercel, Fly, Render, Modal, Supabase, Upstash, Pinecone, Postmark and SendGrid. Each one joins after the live test and not before. If you run one of them and want it first, say so on the vendor audit form and it moves to the front of the line.
Questions people ask
Why are only 4 vendors in the Full tier?
Because Full requires a proven, reversible kill by API on a real account, and only ElevenLabs, Neon, Railway and Cloudflare have passed that test as of October 9, 2026. Promoting a vendor without the test would make the tier a label instead of a fact.
Can I add a vendor that is not on the list?
Yes. Any vendor can be added as Manual in under a minute: a name, a budget, what it is used for and the environment variable name that holds its key. It gets a budget bar and alerts from the first run. It moves to Watched or Full only after the live test, which we run and publish.
Does Manual mean Mepa8 ignores the vendor?
No. A Manual vendor like Stripe or GitHub still has a budget, still shows on the board, and still alerts when the receipt in the billing inbox is higher than the budget. What is missing is the API pull and the API kill, and the card says so in one word.
Sources
- ElevenLabs pricing — the plan credits referenced above
Change log: October 9, 2026 — First published from our own October 2026 accounts.