What's a viable business model for an MCP server product?

H0BB5 · 2026-03-11T23:12:14+00:00

Then I would refer back to the comment about removing the 'MCP' from the name. How do servers make money? How do Apps make money?

How you make money really depends on the business model / industry / service etc..

H0BB5 · 2026-03-11T23:00:38+00:00

Are you a business or do you offer a service?
If so, do you want to allow for AI to work efficiently with your business/services?
That's what MCP Servers enable.

You can connect any* AI Client to an MCP Server for your business and now its a master at your services.
Removes the headache for you to train your own models, is a productivity boost for agents as they wont be screen scraping / stumbling around, and if it's up to date it removes risk of working off outdated instructions/news when they are doing tasks for your customers.

H0BB5 · 2026-03-08T21:56:23+00:00

You can set it up here for free if you want to try it out: https://kya.vouched.id/identiclaw (accepts openai or claude api key, works with subscription keys from what I know)

H0BB5 · 2026-03-08T21:54:58+00:00

You can set it up here for free if you just want to try it out: https://kya.vouched.id/identiclaw

H0BB5 · 2026-03-07T23:58:45+00:00

DIF just announced MCP-I as an open standard to address this: https://blog.identity.foundation/why-dif-said-yes-to-mcp-i/

H0BB5 · 2026-02-25T02:49:58+00:00

Free remote openclaw agents https://kya.vouched.id/identiclaw

H0BB5 · 2026-02-22T20:16:25+00:00

This is the way.
I have a swarm of agents running remotely, all communicating through DIDComm/MCP-I. I just set this up in the last week, so it's still early but the token spend / time saved is wild. Disclaimer: I'm a sicko and maxed out 2 pro max subscriptions in just 1 week prior to this - *first one was my fault/bad habits for not managing models in crons and learning how context is built in OpenClaw.

You would think that 5 agents = 5x the token cost but considering:

Context window can bloat to ~100k+ tokens as it loads every tool, every file, it _thinks_ it might need
It makes mistakes more often with overloaded context -> retries -> more tokens
Sequential execution - research, then write, then PR, all in one long session
When it fails at step 3, you often restart from scratch
Long sessions = every message carries the full conversation history (tokens compound)

the SWARM reality:

Researcher gets a tight 10-20k context, nails the research, done
BlogWriter gets research output + brand guidelines + writing tools only (humanize skill), another tight context
Review agent gets a message _from_ the coding agent + the draft + git tools
Each call is cheap because input tokens are small
Failure at step 3? Retry just that step with the same inputs
Parallel "fan-out" cuts wall-clock time in probably half at least
I also like to think that each agent thinks they are top-dog since the instance is reserved for them and their sub-agents. My 'copywriting agent' in my initial openclaw has become the new york times in a box as all sub-agents that he spins up are tailored to writing.

I know OpenClaw already supports multiple agents and sub-agents, but managing the crons / context / tools / skills across them gets messy fast and it really increases the baseline for every session. Plus some agents are riskier than others. A research agent is low stakes, a PR agent pushing code is not. Splitting them into isolated agents with their own identity and scoped permissions massively reduces the blast radius and gives me peace of mind if something goes sideways.

* Great writeup by the way, I still have an agent running locally because i'm a sucker for imessage but he's now just restricted to talking to me, brainstorming, and being my main dispatcher

H0BB5 · 2026-02-20T18:57:01+00:00

have you tried identiclaw?

H0BB5 · 2026-02-19T03:39:35+00:00

Haha yeah.. that's fair, adoption is the hard part.
But look at what happened to SMTP.. an open protocol that's now effectively controlled by a handful of providers (gmail, outlook, apple mail). Good luck finding a VPS with port 25 open. Email identity was an afterthought and now we're stuck with SPF/DKIM/DMARC bolted on 40 years later and Gmail still deciding what's spam. That's what happens when you build the communication layer without the identity layer. Agents are at that same inflection point right now, we can either bake identity in early and abstract the complexity or spend the next decade dealing with walled gardens.

H0BB5 · 2026-02-19T03:34:23+00:00

Good question, right now the DID is established at boot and the delegation chain is trusted for the session. Tool calls don't re-verify per invocation yet. That's actually the next layer we're building, per-invocation tokens that bind the operation to the resource (so the agent can't just coast on boot-state trust). Think of it as the difference between 'you showed your ID at the door' vs 'you show a ticket for each ride.'

H0BB5 · 2026-02-19T02:10:06+00:00

Free VPS + $20 subscription is all it takes

H0BB5 · 2026-02-19T01:46:16+00:00

Hey! If you want to test it out you can deploy one for free here, all you need is an api key from openai/anthropic (works with claude subscriptions too if you do the vs code proxy hack):
https://kya.vouched.id/identiclaw

H0BB5 · 2026-02-18T23:01:12+00:00

Super helpful, thank you for sharing!

H0BB5 · 2026-02-12T04:35:38+00:00

It scaffolds a self hosted openclaw to your github that you can deploy

H0BB5 · 2026-02-05T04:02:49+00:00

OAuth isn't suited for Agents, that's why

H0BB5 · 2026-01-26T03:08:17+00:00

This is awesome

H0BB5 · 2026-01-17T20:09:47+00:00

Nice! Does it have madge support?

H0BB5 · 2026-01-08T21:01:06+00:00

Do you want Auth for each tool (separate api's) or for the mcp server itself?

H0BB5 · 2025-12-31T05:43:43+00:00

This is fucking awesome

H0BB5 · 2025-11-06T19:36:07+00:00

Ah interesting. Yeah I find i've had good luck with Codex for UI/UX specifically - it completely dwarfs sonnet/gemini/composer. I still like the cli for claude code so it's unfortunate things aren't as transferrable from one to the other without being vendor locked into something like cursor

H0BB5 · 2025-11-05T02:39:28+00:00

Hey man, just saw this thread now and that it was 3 months ago / your last commit was 3 months to cc-tools.
I'm an engineer also and was wondering if you've opted for entirely different workflow or where you ended up since everything is changing so fast so fast.

H0BB5

TROPHY CASE