Garry Tan Was Right: "MCP Sucks Honestly." I Have the Token Receipts.

A developer's token audit of MCP servers reveals that a typical setup of 10 servers injects 111,713 tokens into the context window before any user query, costing up to $2,376 per year in API fees. The audit found that Google Drive's schema alone consumes 47,293 tokens, and that 3 of 10 servers were never used weekly. The developer built a CLI tool called mcptoon that compresses MCP schemas by 97%, reducing annual costs from $2,376 to $69.

"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 https://github.com/activeing123/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 — loading 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.