Quick start

This page takes you from nothing to a first governed answer in about five minutes, using the AcmeCloud sample estate. All you need is a browser.

1. Sign up and create a workspace. Go to app.getmetatate.com/sign-up and sign up with email or with Google or GitHub, then create a workspace. As its creator you are the owner, so every step below is available to you. Details in create a workspace.

2. Load the AcmeCloud sample. Open Getting Started from the bottom of the sidebar and load the sample workspace — choose Load the full estate to get all 9 tables, 15 approved policies, and a live publication in one step. See load the AcmeCloud sample for what this provisions. Prefer your own data? Connect a data source instead — the rest of this path is the same once you have authored and published policies of your own.

3. Open a policy. Go to Policies and open AcmeCloud customer use guardrails: customer data supports analytics, reporting, and support workflows, while marketing, advertising, personalization, and model training are prohibited. The approved version is a canonical policy, and the instructions derived from it are what deployments publish. More in the policies guide.

4. See the live publication. Go to Deployments. The sample load ran through the real deployment pipeline, so a current deployment publication is already live — this is the serving state, and its deployed instruction decisions are what every decision-bearing answer reads. More in the deployments guide.

5. Issue an MCP token. Go to MCP Tools and open the Tokens tab (admin or owner only). Issue an access token and copy it immediately — it is shown once. The Connect tab has your workspace's MCP endpoint and client configuration; see connect an agent, or use the Claude Code plugin.

6. Ask your first question. You can ask from any connected agent, or right away — no client setup — from the Test Tools tab in MCP Tools, which includes a structured workbench for authorize_use. Ask whether a marketing use of customer data is allowed:

   {
     "asset": {
       "database": "acmecloud_demo",
       "schema": "public",
       "table": "customers"
     },
     "use": "Use customer records for a direct marketing campaign"
   }

   Expect a typed answered response with a deny decision: marketing is a prohibited use under AcmeCloud customer use guardrails, and the answer cites the instruction rows, the policy version, and the publication it was read from. The response is advisory — it describes the decision; it does not block anything.

7. See an honest gap (full estate). Ask the same question about acmecloud_demo.public.legacy_customer_backup. It is cataloged but deliberately ungoverned, so the answer state is not_enough_published_state — a typed "no published decision exists", never a guess. All three states are described in answer states.

From here, explore the seven tools in the MCP overview, or check plans before inviting your team.