Sign up with an email and password. This creates your billing account and a personal workspace automatically — there's nothing else to set up first. You land on the Free plan: no credits, but full access to every feature as long as you bring your own provider key (see BYOK).
If you came from Pricing and picked a paid plan, signup takes you straight to checkout for that plan instead. If checkout fails or you cancel, you're still signed up on Free — you can upgrade any time from Account → Billing.
You don't have to choose one exclusively — BYOK and platform credits coexist per provider, and the platform only pays for models curated with an active price. See BYOK.
From your workspace dashboard, create an assistant — pick a model, write its instructions, and optionally attach a knowledge source or a tool. Open Chat to talk to it immediately; no deploy step.
Once it works the way you want, you can:
An assistant answers one message at a time in a chat. An agent runs a multi-step task toward a goal — possibly in the background, possibly pausing to ask you a question or wait for approval before a sensitive action. See Core concepts if you're not sure which one fits.