You landed here because you have an Aforo account and you want to ship something. This section gets a real usage event flowing in under fifteen minutes, then explains the model behind it so the rest of the docs read as a system instead of a list of features.
Engineers wiring metering into a backend, product managers scoping a pricing change, and integration consultants doing a discovery week. You don't need to know what a rate plan is yet — you will after Core Concepts. You do need an account, an API key, and one HTTP-capable service to point at us.
The Quick Start collapses the full integration into five steps. Here's the shape so you know what you're committing to:
1
Mint an API key
Developer Hub → API Keys → Create. Save the plaintext value; it shows once.
1 min
2
Send a meter event
curl POST /v1/meter with customer id, metric name, and quantity. 200 OK.
2 min
3
See it in the dashboard
Operator UI → Intelligence → Event Log. The event is searchable in under 30 seconds.
1 min
4
Wire the same call from your service
Copy the curl into the SDK of your language (Node, Python, Go, Java) or paste it into Postman.
5 min
5
Check entitlement before the action
GET /v1/entitlements/can-access returns a boolean + reason. Gate the request on it.
3 min
INFO
The Quick Start runs against sandbox.aforo.ai with an sk_test_ key by default. Nothing in this walk-through hits production data or generates a real invoice — see for how to switch when you're ready.
What this section does NOT cover
Getting Started is deliberately scoped to first-event success. You won't find rate-plan design, invoice layout, ERP wiring, or storefront customization here — those live in their own sections and are listed below under Next up. If you came looking for one of those and landed here, jump straight to the right section.