Fewer than 5% of MCP servers make money. I put a real payment gate in front of one and wrote down what actually broke.
The problem, with numbers
There are 10,000+ Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers out there right now, with 97 million+ combined downloads. MCP is the emerging standard for how AI agents call tools — search, databases, APIs, whatever a server wants to expose. It's had a huge adoption wave.
Fewer than 5% of the people running those servers earn anything from them.
Not because nobody would pay. It's because "let people pay per call" means building, from scratch, on top of your actual product:






