"MCP sucks honestly. Context window eats too much, auth is a mess. I wrote a CLI wrapper in 30 minutes and it works better."
When YC's CEO says this on X, people listen. But nobody had the data to back it up.
Until now.
Three things happened in the last 6 months that changed how I think about MCP:
The community split into two camps:
Both are wrong. The problem isn't MCP. The problem is what MCP does to your context window.
I connected 10 MCP servers to a token counter. Here's what I found:
| MCP Server | Tools | Token Cost | Equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sequential Thinking | 3 | 890 | This blog post |
| Brave Search | 8 | 2,103 | A short email |
| Filesystem | 11 | 3,847 | A README |
| Memory | 9 | 2,567 | A meeting note |
| Puppeteer | 15 | 5,890 | A chapter of a book |
| Postgres | 19 | 8,231 | A whitepaper |
| GitHub | 28 | 12,440 | A court filing |
| Notion | 24 | 13,780 | A legal contract |
| Slack | 22 | 14,672 | A novella chapter |
| Google Drive | |||
| 31 | |||
| 47,293 | |||
| Half of a novel | |||
| Total | |||
| 170 | |||
| 111,713 | |||
| A short book |
One MCP server — Google Drive — injects 47,293 tokens into your context before you ask a single question.
The entire works of Shakespeare is 900K tokens. Google Drive's schema is 5% of Shakespeare. For listing files.
At Claude 3.5 Sonnet pricing ($3/M input tokens, $15/M output):
| Scenario | Tokens | Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 server (minimal) | 3,847 | $0.01/conv | $4.40/yr |
| 3 servers (common) | 14,528 | $0.04/conv | $19.40/yr |
| 5 servers (typical) | 33,061 | $0.10/conv | $44/yr |
| 10 servers (max) | 111,713 | $0.34/conv | $1,496/yr |
| 10 servers + 20 tool calls | ~180,000 | $0.54/conv | $2,376/yr |
Assumptions: 20 conversations/day, 220 working days/year.
$2,376/year. In JSON braces. For tools you might not even use.
Anthropic published a blog showing that complex MCP workflows can consume 150,000+ tokens. Their solution? A 98.7% token reduction by moving tool definitions from context to runtime code.
Translation: The fix for MCP's token waste is to stop using MCP the way MCP was designed.
Cloudflare went further. Their 2,500-endpoint API originally required 1.17M tokens of schema. They compressed it to 1K by exposing just two functions: search
and execute
.
1,170,000 → 1,000.
That's not an optimization. That's an architecture admission.
Money is measurable. But the worse cost is what MCP bloat does to your agent's intelligence:
Without MCP bloat (3K tokens overhead):
Context used by schemas: 2%
Context for reasoning: 98%
Conversation longevity: 40+ messages
Tool selection accuracy: high (few tools to choose from)
With MCP bloat (111K tokens overhead):
Context used by schemas: 56%
Context for reasoning: 44%
Conversation longevity: 15 messages
Tool selection accuracy: low (170 tools, model gets confused)
Your agent isn't getting dumber. Your context window is getting fuller.
Do you? I audited my own setup:
| Server | Token Cost | Used/Week | CLI Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub | 12,440 | 3 | |
gh (built into Claude Code) |
|||
| Slack | 14,672 | 0 | slack-cli |
| Google Drive | 47,293 | 1 | gdrive |
| Notion | 13,780 | 2 | API + curl |
| Puppeteer | 5,890 | 0 | |
playwright CLI |
Three servers were used zero times per week. Two more had direct CLI equivalents. I was paying $1,346/year for tools I never touched.
After the audit, I kept 3 servers, removed 7, and proxied the remaining 3 through mcptoon:
pip install mcptoon
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Servers | 10 | 3 |
| Schema tokens | 111,713 | 3,247 |
| Reduction | — | 97% |
| Annual cost | $2,376 | $69 |
| Savings | — | $2,307 |
mcptoon wraps your MCP servers and compresses their schemas into a TOON format — 97% smaller, same functionality, zero dependencies.
Garry Tan was right. Not because MCP is fundamentally broken — it's not. The protocol is fine. But the implementation pattern — every tool schema into context at startup — is a tax on every developer using it.
The evidence is overwhelming:
The fix isn't a new protocol. It's a smarter proxy layer.
pip install mcptoon
Or just remove your unused MCP servers. That's free and takes 2 minutes.
"MCP was a mistake" is too strong. But "MCP as currently implemented is burning your token budget" is exactly right.
All data measured with tiktoken (cl100k_base). Scripts: GitHub. Independent, not affiliated with Anthropic, YC, or Perplexity.