The MCP specification has no billing layer. Nothing in the protocol carries a price, a plan, a card or an entitlement, so every paid MCP server has bolted payment on somewhere outside the protocol. They have not agreed on where, and that is why this question does not have a clean answer yet.
A blind search run recorded here on 2026-09-10 in docs/BLIND_RECOMMENDATION_R1.md asked
exactly this and came back with four marketplaces using four different pricing models and no dominant
one. That is the real answer, so this page describes the models rather than picking a winner.
| Model | Where it turns up | What you are actually agreeing to |
|---|---|---|
| Per call | AgenticMarket, roughly $0.03 to $0.50 a call with free trial calls, as recorded in that run | The meter runs on tool calls, not on results. An assistant that retries a failed call pays twice. |
| Creator-priced, platform-hosted | MCPize, which handles hosting, payment and tax | Whatever the author picked. Subscription, per install, usage or freemium all appear on the same platform. |
| Pay per event | Apify, an actor marketplace that added MCP hosting; the creator keeps around 80% less compute | Compute is billed separately from the tool, so a long-running job and a quick lookup cost very differently. |
| Execution quota | MCPBundles, a free tier of 25 executions a month plus paid tiers | A monthly allowance across servers. Cheap until an agent loop eats the allowance in an afternoon. |
| A licence key sold directly | The server's own site. This catalogue works this way. | You buy a key, the key unlocks the software, and the protocol never sees the money. |
The four marketplace rows come from that recorded run and describe what the search returned on one day. Check the current page before you sign up for any of them; none of these prices is a quote from us.
Per-call pricing and an agent are an awkward pair. Assistants retry, they list tools on every turn, and they call a cheap tool five times to answer one question. A meter that counts calls counts all of that. Subscription pricing has the reverse problem, which is that you keep paying in the months you never open the client. A one-time key sits in the middle: you pay once, and the vendor then has no ongoing revenue reason to keep the service running, which is a risk you should price in.
One more difference goes unadvertised. A per-call or quota model needs a server that phones home, because somebody has to count. A key that verifies offline does not, and that changes what the vendor can see about your work.
A key here looks like MCPL1.xxx.yyy. It is an Ed25519 signature over a small payload
holding the product, an id and the issue time, and the public key is compiled into the server. Nothing is
checked over the network, so activation works on a plane and there is no activation server that can go
away. The code is in packages/mcp-license in this repository if you want to read it rather
than take the claim.
Two consequences follow from that and both are worth stating plainly. The server has no way to count your usage, revoke your key or notice that you moved machines. And a leaked key cannot be turned off, which is the cost of the same design.
One server is $19 once. All 33 servers that are sold singly are $39 once, which is where the office-suite server gets its key from as well, since it has no price of its own. Lifetime, no subscription, no seat count. Checkout is Stripe's own page, the card never touches this site, and if you lose the key you can recover it at /recover with the email Stripe collected.
The free tier is not a trial. It has no expiry, needs no card and no account, and on most servers it is
meant to be the whole product for light use. Three examples, read from
data/facts.json:
Three routes, all equivalent. Run the license_activate tool in the chat with the key. Or
set MCP_LICENSE_KEY in the environment of the stdio server. Or, on a hosted endpoint, put the
key where the anonymous token goes in the URL.
One click, no JSON. Download invoice.mcpb from the
latest release and open it in Claude Desktop. It runs on the
Node runtime Claude Desktop ships with, so your own PATH and node version never come into it.
Or a URL, with nothing installed. /mcp/connect mints a free anonymous token and prints the ready line:
claude mcp add --transport http invoice https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/invoice/t/<token>Or from a clone, for a client with no bundle installer. Build once, then point the client at the built file:
git clone https://github.com/theluckystrike/mcp-servers.git
cd mcp-servers && npm install
npm run build -w packages/mcp-license -w servers/invoice
claude mcp add --scope user invoice -- node /absolute/path/to/mcp-servers/servers/invoice/dist/index.jsClaude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf and Cline take the same two strings as JSON, in
claude_desktop_config.json or the client's own MCP config file:
{
"mcpServers": {
"invoice": {
"command": "node",
"args": ["/absolute/path/to/mcp-servers/servers/invoice/dist/index.js"]
}
}
}The npm packages are not published yet, so the npx form below returns a 404 today. It is
kept because it is what that config becomes the day the publish lands, with nothing else changed;
installing these servers when npx does not work yet
has the whole picture.
claude mcp add invoice -- npx -y @theluckystrike/mcp-invoicenpx, wait.At least four exist and none of them dominates, which is why the search that prompted this page returned no consensus. AgenticMarket, MCPize, Apify and MCPBundles each list paid servers under a different pricing model, so browsing one of them shows you a slice rather than the market.
No. One price, once, per server or for the whole set, and a free tier that does not expire. Per-call billing would need the server to phone home on every call, and these servers do not have that path.
Nothing technical, because verification is offline and there is no activation server to notice. The key is sold on the same basis as a book. If it leaks it cannot be revoked, which is the trade for it working with the network off.
Not with the bundle. The bundle key unlocks every server in the catalogue, including ones added after the purchase, and that is why the office-suite server has no separate price.
You do not, for any of them. The thing you can check is whether the software keeps working without the vendor. A server you run locally with an offline key keeps working; a hosted endpoint or a per-call meter stops the day the company does.
All MCP servers and prices · All guides · Buy the bundle $39