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It's not just that nobody makes money providing a free and open API. It's that to operate such an API you'll basically need unlimited resources. No matter how m
by jsnell 1y ago
It's not just that nobody makes money providing a free and open API. It's that to operate such an API you'll basically need unlimited resources. No matter how many resources you throw at the problem, somebody will still figure out a way of exhausting those resources for marginal gains. MCP will just make the problem worse as AI agents descend on any open MCP servers like locusts.
The only stable option, I think, is going to be pay-per-call RPC pricing. It's at least more viable to do then it was for Web 2.0 APIs, since at least the entity operating the model / agent will act as a clearinghouse for all the payments. (And I guess their most likely billing model is to fold these costs into their subscription plans? That seems like the best way to align incentives.)
- noodletheworld 1y agoThis is correct imo. ...and just like no one is prepared to pay 500 different vendors for micro-transactions, no one is prepared to pay 500 different websites for their MCP services. Much much more likely is that a few big players (like google and AWS) will have paid-tier 'mega-MCP' servers, that offer 90% of what people need and fit in with existing payment/auth solutions (like your AWS account) and... ...everyone else with an MCP server will be left out in the cold. That's what's going to happen. These MCP servers will be cute for a very very short amount of time until people try to monetize them, and then they will consolidate very very quickly into a much smaller set of servers that people are already paying. Mostly cloud providers.