> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.paygentic.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Quickstart

> Four steps from zero to billing

Four steps from zero to billing. This guide walks through the essential Paygentic setup using Standard Billing.

A sandbox environment is available at [platform.sandbox.paygentic.io](https://platform.sandbox.paygentic.io) for risk-free testing with identical credentials.

<Tip>
  Using [Claude Code](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code)? Install the [Paygentic skills plugin](/platform/building-with-llms#claude-code-skills) first so Claude can generate the integration code as you read along.
</Tip>

<Steps>
  <Step title="Define a Product">
    A product represents the service you sell. Give it a clear name (e.g., "LLM Inference Engine", "Vision AI Platform"), a description, and associate it with your merchant account. You can create products through the API or the dashboard.

    See [Products](/platform/pricing/products) for the full reference.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Set Up Pricing">
    With a product in place, configure three things: what you measure, how you price it, and how you package it.

    **Billable metrics** define the units you track — input tokens, output tokens, GPU minutes, API calls, or anything else your service meters.

    **Prices** attach a standard pricing model to each metric — including percentage-style multipliers and revenue share (a unit price of `0.1` charges 10% of the metered value). Each price also carries a payment term: `in_advance` for upfront charges like platform fees, or `in_arrears` for metered usage billed at period end.

    **Plans** bundle your prices into a subscribable offering. Every plan has a billing interval (monthly or yearly), a currency, and a set of prices. Plans default to Standard Billing (`billingVersion: 1`), which supports Invoice 0 payment gating, metered entitlements, and features.

    See [Billable Metrics](/platform/pricing/billable-metrics), [Prices](/platform/pricing/prices), and [Plans](/platform/pricing/plans) for details on each.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Create a Customer and Subscribe">
    Create a customer for each organization you bill, then create a subscription to connect that customer to a plan.

    If the plan includes in-advance charges, Paygentic generates an initial invoice covering the first period's upfront fees. The subscription activates once that invoice is paid. If the plan has no upfront fees, there is nothing to collect and the subscription activates immediately.

    See [Customer Lifecycle](/platform/billing/customer-lifecycle) for the full activation flow.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Report Usage">
    Once the subscription is active, send meter events to record consumption. Post each event to `POST /v0/events` with the customer ID, metric, and quantity. The endpoint is fire-and-forget — it always returns `202 Accepted`.

    See [Meter Events](/platform/metering/meter-events) for the event schema and examples.
  </Step>
</Steps>

Setup complete. Continue with the [Pricing Overview](/platform/pricing/overview) for a deeper look at how products, metrics, prices, and plans fit together, or see [Billing Versions](/platform/billing/billing-versions) for a comparison of Standard and Legacy Billing.