At my day job we kept our FAQ in a Google Sheet so non-technical teammates could edit it without touching code. A third-party service turned that sheet into an API the website could read. It worked until the FAQ page started showing up blank. No error, no warning, just an empty page. The service's free tier had a low monthly request cap, and ordinary traffic had quietly used it up.
My fix was not a good one. I made three more accounts on the same service and rotated them by hand, so we never leaned on any one account long enough to hit its limit. Two simple sheets now needed four juggled logins just to stay online.
That is the problem PasteSheet exists to solve. You paste a Google Sheet URL and it gives you a reliable, cached API for that sheet. This post is about a newer part of it: the MCP server, which lets an AI agent like Claude read your sheet directly. If you have ever wanted Claude or Cursor to answer questions straight from your own spreadsheet, this is how you do it.
What an MCP server actually is
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the standard way AI clients like Claude and Cursor connect to outside data. An MCP server hands the AI a set of tools it can call. The AI decides when to use them and what to do with the results.
