QUICKSTART

Three steps. Five minutes. From signup to your agent calling a metered MCP.

v0.1.0 UPDATED 2026-05-09 ~4 MIN READ

OVERVIEW

mcpmeter is a metering proxy that sits in front of every MCP server you call. You sign up once, get a single bearer key, and every tool call is metered against your credit balance and forwarded to the publisher's upstream. No card needed to start — $0.10 of starter credit is added on signup.

YOU NEED

An agent that speaks MCP — Claude Desktop, Cursor, Continue, the OpenAI Apps SDK, OpenRouter, or any client that supports remote MCP servers over HTTP.

STEP 01 · CREATE AN ACCOUNT

Head to mcpmeter.com/register and sign up as a consumer. You'll land on the dashboard with $0.10 of starter credit already on your balance — about 500 metered calls at the typical $0.0002/call price. Plus, each MCP grants its own monthly free tier on top.

STEP 02 · MINT AN API KEY

Open the Keys page, label your key (e.g. Cursor · production), and click Generate. The full secret is shown once — copy it immediately. Only the SHA-256 hash is stored on our side; we cannot recover a lost secret.

Your key looks like this:

secret formatBEARER

mcpm_live_a8f3c4e9b2…

Mint a separate key per agent (or per environment) so you can revoke them independently.

SHOWN ONCE

The full secret is visible only on the page where you generate it. We hash it on save; we cannot show it to you again. Lose it → revoke and regenerate.

STEP 03 · WIRE IT INTO YOUR AGENT

Drop the key into your agent's MCP config. Pick any slug from the marketplace — we'll use weather below.

Claude Desktop · macOS

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

claude_desktop_config.jsonJSON

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "weather": {
      "url": "https://proxy.mcpmeter.com/weather",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer mcpm_live_…"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. The weather tools appear in the tool drawer; ask Claude what the weather is in Tbilisi.

Cursor

Same shape at ~/.cursor/mcp.json — paste the same block. Reload Cursor or open a new chat.

Other clients

Continue, OpenAI Apps SDK, OpenRouter and raw curl/Python/Node/Go examples live on the Clients & code samples page.

VERIFY IT'S METERED

Open the Activity page. You should see a fresh row per call, with status 200, latency, and the price debited. If something's wrong, every error response carries an X-Mcpmeter-Request-Id header — quote it when reporting issues.

WHAT IF IT FAILS?

The errors reference covers every status code we return, including 401 (key issue), 402 (out of credit), 429 (rate-limited), and 502 (upstream failed — debit refunded).

WHAT'S NEXT?

Concepts — how the proxy thinks: auth, rate limits, free tier, atomic credit debit, ledger.
Pricing model — per-call prices, the platform take rate, monthly settlements.
Publishing an MCP — if you want to list your own server and get paid out.

Concepts