Originally published in Spanish on El Rack, a Spanish tech review site I write for. Browser translation handles the rest of the site well if you want to dig deeper into the sysadmin/homelab content.
Claude Code is my main tool every day for managing a handful of self-hosted projects. So when "just install these 10 MCP servers" guides kept showing up in every forum thread, I wanted to actually separate what's worth the setup time from what's just noise sitting in your context window.
Here's what I found after digging into the current state of the ecosystem.
The cost nobody mentions before you install ten of these
Before the list: the one number that matters most. Every connected MCP server injects somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 tokens of tool schemas at session start. Three servers connected at once is already 6,000 to 15,000 tokens spent before you type your first prompt.
