Quickstart

This guide takes you from nothing to a working AI agent answering real messages. It follows the same five steps as the setup checklist on your dashboard — the checklist ticks itself off as you go, because each step is derived from what actually exists in your workspace.

1. Create your first bot

Sign up at Zapito → Sign up — your workspace is created automatically on first sign-in. The dashboard leads with one input: describe your support agent. Write something like

“Answer shipping and returns questions for my shoe store, escalate to a human when unsure.”

and hit Build my agent. The AI builder creates the bot and wires the whole flow on the canvas — trigger, agent, knowledge topics, confidence check, reply and handoff. Prefer to wire it yourself? Pick a template or start from a blank canvas and drag nodes from the library; either way you can edit everything by hand afterwards.

2. Add a model key

Zapito is bring-your-own-key: your agent runs on your own model API key, billed by your provider at cost (Zapito adds 0% markup).

1. Go to Settings → API keys in the app.
2. Under Provider keys (BYOK), add a key for OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.
3. Zapito validates the key with one tiny live model call before saving — so a typo’d key, a key in the wrong field, or a key with no credit fails right there — and stores it encrypted (AES-256-GCM).

See BYOK overview for the full who-pays-what picture.

3. Send a test message

Open the Test chat panel on the canvas (the AI builder offers a Test it now button right after building) and message your bot. This runs the real runtime — the same engine that powers every channel — and shows a trace of each node as the message walks the flow: which branch the confidence check took, what your custom tool returned, what the agent’s confidence was.

4. Connect a channel

Click the trigger node — its drawer holds the channel connection:

• Web widget — copy a one-line <script> snippet onto your site.
• Telegram — paste a bot token from @BotFather; live in under a minute.
• WhatsApp — enable the shared sandbox number and message it from your phone. For a number your business owns, the Connect your own number stepper explains what Meta requires and queues your workspace for Embedded Signup access.

Each channel has its own guide under Channels.

5. Go live

Hit Deploy. Live bots answer on every connected channel; pause a bot from its card menu and it goes silent everywhere at once. That’s it — your agent is answering real messages.