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Which MCP servers work by pasting a URL, with nothing installed

Most MCP servers you will find are programs. The listing hands you npx -y something or a JSON block with command and args, and your client starts a process on your machine. A remote MCP server is different. It is a URL that speaks the MCP streamable HTTP transport, your client opens an HTTP connection to it, and the tools show up. No process starts, nothing gets installed, and there is nothing to keep updated.

This page is about how to find those, how to tell a real one from a URL that will not work, and what you give up by using one. 30 of the servers in this catalogue are remote endpoints and they are listed at the bottom, but the first half of the page is not about them.

How to tell a remote server from a local one

Read the install instructions, not the description. Three signals settle it.

A local server gives you a command. npx, uvx, docker run, or a config entry with command and args in it.
A remote server gives you a URL, and a client config entry with a url field and no command. In Claude Code it is claude mcp add --transport http.
In the MCP registry's server.json the difference is structural. A local server carries a packages array; a remote one carries a remotes array with a type of streamable-http and a url.

The word "hosted" on a product page is not a signal. Plenty of hosted products mean "we run a web app and it has an MCP server you install locally to talk to it".

Where the remote servers are

No single index exists. A blind search run recorded in this repository on 2026-09-10, in docs/BLIND_RECOMMENDATION_R1.md, asked an assistant this exact question and it came back with a category and two artifacts rather than a server, which is the honest state of the answer today. What it found, and what each thing is actually good for:

What	Where	Use it for
awesome-remote-mcp-servers, a curated list by jaw9c	`github.com/jaw9c/awesome-remote-mcp-servers`	Browsing. It is the closest thing to a directory of URL-only servers.
Vendor remotes from Notion, Linear, Sentry, Stripe and Azure DevOps	Each vendor's own docs	Connecting an assistant to an account you already pay for.
An in-browser tester	`mcpplaygroundonline.com/mcp-test-server`	Checking that a URL answers before you wire it into a client.
The MCP registry itself	`registry.modelcontextprotocol.io`	Filtering on the `remotes` array. Noisier, but it is the only machine-readable source.

Two of those are directories and one is a debugger, so none of them is an answer to "which server should I use". The registry is the only one you can query, and it is worth knowing what a query returns. An independent count filed on the registry's issue tracker as issue 1626 on 2026-09-07, and recorded in docs/CONTENT_R3.md here, looked at 16,305 endpoints declaring a remote: 58.5% answered tools/list without a credential, 25.4% required authentication, and 8.6% answered HTTP but did not speak MCP at all. So roughly one URL in twelve on that list is already dead.

The two things that decide whether you can use a URL today

A remote server is usable with nothing installed only if both of these hold, and most vendor remotes fail the second one.

It answers initialize and tools/list with no credential. If it does not, your client cannot even show you what the server offers before you sign in, and several directories will list it as offline.
It gives you a credential without an account. A vendor remote that starts an OAuth flow into your Notion or Stripe account is not a paste-a-URL server for someone who does not already have that account. It is a connector to a product you own.

What this catalogue offers, and the exact URL

30 servers here answer at https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/<server>. No account, no OAuth and no email address appears anywhere in the flow. One POST gets you a token:

curl -X POST https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/token

It returns a token shaped anon_<32 hex>. Put it in the path and you have a URL that works in a client that cannot set headers, which is most of them:

https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/invoice/t/anon_0dbe552cc87465e0f00bcbf5ff44adfe

The bare form without /t/<token> is not the same thing, and this is the part that catches people. Probed on 2026-09-10, an unauthenticated initialize against /mcp/invoice returned 200 with serverInfo naming mcp-invoice version 0.21.0, and an unauthenticated tools/call against the same URL returned 401 with a body naming both credential forms. So the bare URL is enough for a directory to introspect and not enough to run a tool. Use the token form.

/mcp/connect does the mint and prints one ready line per server if you would rather not run curl. The client-by-client detail, including the Claude.ai custom connector dialog and the Cursor and VS Code entries, is on connect without installing.

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.js

Claude 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-invoice

What the free tier allows, in numbers

Limit	Value
Calls per hour on a free token	600
Calls per hour on a Pro key	6000
Unauthenticated discovery calls per hour	120
New tokens per hour from one IP	10
Token lifetime, refreshed on every write	30 days
Documents deleted after this long untouched	35 days

Per-server free limits are separate from the rate limit and are listed on each server's page. The invoice server, for example, allows 3 invoices per calendar month; overdue report free; PDF carries a small footer line..

What it costs

The free tier has no expiry and no card. Pro is $19 once for one server or $39 once for all 33 that are sold singly, and a Pro key replaces the anonymous token in the same URL. No subscription, and no seat count.

What a remote MCP server cannot do

This is the section that decides whether you want one, so it is longer than the pitch.

It cannot touch your files. The stdio build of these servers reads and writes under your own data directory. The hosted build has no access to your disk at all, so anything the tool needs has to arrive in the call or through an upload tool.
The tool list is not always identical. The hosted wrapper adds file-transfer tools to some servers. The zip server registers 7 tools over stdio and its hosted endpoint returned 12 in a tools/list on 2026-09-10, because three upload and download tools only exist in the hosted form.
The token is a bearer secret sitting in a URL. Anyone who has the URL can read the data under it, and URLs end up in shell history and screenshots. Treat it as a password.
Your data is not backed up. Documents are deleted 35 days after the last touch. That is a design decision about retention, not a storage product.
Some clients re-handshake every registered endpoint on every turn, which spends several of your 600 hourly calls before a tool runs. If you register twenty endpoints and hit the ceiling without doing anything, this is why.
4 of the 34 servers here have no hosted form. The office-suite server spawns its siblings as local child processes, which only makes sense on your own machine, and delivery-schedule has no endpoint yet. Both are bundle-and-clone only.
One person runs this, with no status page and no service level agreement, and the honest comparison against a local install is that a local server keeps working when this domain does not.

The servers you can paste today

Every one of these takes https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/<name>/t/<token>.

time-tracker, price-tracker, invoice, expense-tracker, spreadsheet, currency, timezone, docx, resume, recurring, clauses, pdf, calendar, kanban, image, bank-statement, quotes, barcode, zip, billing-docs, deposits, per-diem, asset-register, statement-of-account, cash-book, amortization, petty-cash, work-order, catalogue, change-order

Questions

Do I need an account to use these URLs?

No. One POST to https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/token returns an anonymous token shaped anon_ plus 32 hex characters. No email field, no password and no OAuth screen appears anywhere in the flow.

Why does the URL without a token return 401?

The bare endpoint answers initialize, tools/list, resources/list and ping so that a directory can introspect it, and refuses tools/call. That split is deliberate: discovery is open, running a tool is not, because a tool call reads and writes data that belongs to a tenant.

Can I use a remote server and a local one at the same time?

Yes, and most people should. Register the local build for anything that has to read files on your disk, and the remote URL for anything you want on a machine you do not control. They are separate data stores, so entries made in one do not appear in the other.

What happens to my data when I stop using the token?

Documents are deleted 35 days after the last touch and the token itself lapses 30 days after its last use. Nothing is archived and there is no export-on-close step, so pull anything you want to keep before you walk away.

Is a remote server slower than a local one?

It adds a network round trip per call, so yes, measurably. For a tool that renders a PDF the difference is small against the render itself. For a chatty sequence of small calls it is noticeable.

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