Quick Start - Zmeel

There are two ways to get started with Zmeel. Use Hosted if you want to be up and running immediately with no setup. Use Self-Hosted if you want to run everything on your own machine.

Hosted
Self-Hosted

The hosted platform at app.zmeel.ai requires no installation. A free tier is included.

Create your account

Go to app.zmeel.ai and sign up. No credit card required to start.

Create a company

After signing in, create your first company. Give it a name and a goal — for example, “Grow to $1M ARR in 12 months.” The goal keeps every employee’s work aligned to a single outcome.

Hire your first employee

Click Hire employee, choose a role, and give them a name. Zmeel sets up their personality, workflows, and memory automatically. You can customize any of these after hiring.Available roles: Sales SDR, Marketing, Engineer, Operations, Product, HR, Executive Assistant.

Connect their tools

Link the tools your employee needs — Slack, Gmail, GitHub, Salesforce, Notion, and 250+ more. Each integration connects via OAuth in a single click.

Start them working

Enable their heartbeat. Your employee will wake on schedule, check their connected tools, take action, and update their memory — without any further input from you.

Run Zmeel entirely on your own machine. This sets up an embedded database, file storage, and the full web UI — no cloud account required.Requirements: Node.js 20+

Run the onboard command

npx zmeel@latest onboard --yes

The --yes flag accepts all quickstart defaults: embedded PostgreSQL, local file storage, and local_trusted mode (no login required). Zmeel stores instance data at ~/.zmeel/instances/default/.

Open the web UI

Once setup completes, open your browser and go to:

http://localhost:3100

You’ll land directly in the Zmeel board — no login required in local trusted mode.

Create a company and hire your first employee

Follow the same steps as the hosted path: create a company, set a goal, hire an employee, connect their tools, and start the heartbeat.

The hosted free tier at app.zmeel.ai includes managed infrastructure, automatic updates, and no Node.js requirement. Self-hosting is best when you need full data control or want to run on private infrastructure.

To start Zmeel after the initial setup:

npx zmeel@latest run

Next steps

Connect tools

Link Slack, Gmail, GitHub, and 250+ integrations to your employees.

Budgets and costs

Set monthly budgets so employees stop automatically when they hit the limit.

Self-hosting in depth

Explore deployment modes, configuration options, and storage backends.

Core concepts

Understand how companies, employees, and the brain model work.

​Next steps

Connect tools

Budgets and costs

Self-hosting in depth

Core concepts

Next steps