I'm curious what the revenue plan is for MCP authors. I mean, I can see wanting to add support for existing products (like an code/text editor, image/sound/video editor, etc.)
But is there a market for stand-alone paid MCP services? It seems these will mostly be usurped by the models themselves sooner or later. I mean if you create a MCP popular enough to actually make money, the foundation model will soon be able to just do it without your service. Almost like you are doing experimentation on high-value agent features for free.
Also, something about the format just reeks of SOAP to me. It feels over-engineered. Time will tell, obviously.
Most MCP servers are thin wrappers around an API, I don't think there will be a big paid market. I imagine they will be released like SDKs are now, either by companies themselves, or by individuals when there's no official implementation. A few dev agents can even write MCP servers for themselves.
Right, that is why I said it makes sense for existing products. I mentioned desktop apps, but it would apply to any existing project. Like JIRA, or HubSpot, Wordpress, or Figma, etc.
But there is hype around MCP as if independent devs could do something with it. And some will just for fun, some will for open source cred. But it is my experience that longevity is usually the result of stable revenue.
I guess what I predict happening here is a few people will build some useful MCPs, realize there is no way to monetize despite generating a lot of interest and the most useful/popular MCPs will be integrated directly into the offerings of the foundational AI companies. And in a few years we won't even remember the acronym unless you happen to work for some big corp that wants to integrate your existing service into LLMs.
The currently-dominant open source paradigm (i.e. motivated and well-meaning developers work themselves to the bone under pressure from tech giants who will never pay them) is clearly not sustainable. Moreover, many are probably not happy with their code being used (without permission) to train machines whose putative intent is to replace those self-same developers. Now the question is, how many will want to do something similar, again?
Is what you are insinuating that the only licensing model for independent MCP authors is open source? Are you assuming that MCPs are only viable as free (as in beer) projects?
I feel like software license and business revenue models are only very loosely correlated. I guess if you are assuming there is no money at all to be made in MCP then my question wouldn't make sense.
But is there a market for stand-alone paid MCP services? It seems these will mostly be usurped by the models themselves sooner or later. I mean if you create a MCP popular enough to actually make money, the foundation model will soon be able to just do it without your service. Almost like you are doing experimentation on high-value agent features for free.
Also, something about the format just reeks of SOAP to me. It feels over-engineered. Time will tell, obviously.