How are you handling payments in your MCPs?

[blustAI]

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• Protocol Specification
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Your Question

I’ve been working on a small library called paymcp for both Python and TypeScript. It’s designed to make it easy to add pricing and accept payments in MCPs - just by adding a price parameter.

Right now, it supports just two providers but it’s built to be provider-agnostic - adding new payment providers is fast and straightforward.

I’m aiming to improve it and make it more flexible for different use cases. I’d love to hear from other developers:
• How are you currently handling payments in your MCP?
• Does your current solution meet your needs?
• If you’ve tried paymcp, what worked well for you and what didn’t?
• What features or provider integrations would you like to see?

Let me know what you think - feedback, ideas, or suggestions are very welcome!

[evalstate]

This is an advertisement, closing.

[blustAI]

This is not an advertisement. It’s a request for technical feedback on an open-source, provider-agnostic library for handling pricing and payments in MCP tools.
Yes, it currently supports Stripe and Walleot but that doesn’t make it promotional. The whole point is to keep it flexible and open to other providers.
I’m genuinely interested in how others are solving payment handling in MCPs . I'm not pitching anything, just trying to improve the ecosystem.

[amnesia0287]

This is not an advertisement. It’s a request for technical feedback on an open-source, provider-agnostic library for handling pricing and payments in MCP tools. Yes, it currently supports Stripe and Walleot but that doesn’t make it promotional. The whole point is to keep it flexible and open to other providers. I’m genuinely interested in how others are solving payment handling in MCPs . I'm not pitching anything, just trying to improve the ecosystem.

It has nothing to do with the MCP standard nor sdk.

It’s also a solution in search of a problem. No one wants to pay per MCP call or use a non deterministic LLM to make payment transactions. Implement oauth and enable payment through roles/claims like anyone else.

MCP is a standard implementation on top of an API… it doesn’t include payments. Adding payments outside of the MCP protocol is an api problem and again one no one is asking for.

There is also zero reason to mention your project name unless it is advertising.

[blustAI]

I agree with you on only one point: “No one wants to pay.” But as long as the code is written by us humans, not AI, we developers still want to be paid for our work.

My vision for the future of AI assistants is that they will be able to search for and choose tools to solve a task (of course asking the user before using them). It would help if tools could at least provide price/terms metadata at the protocol level to guide that choice. The actual payment layer should, of course, be separate and not part of the protocol - no argument there.

I know most paid tools “implement OAuth and enable payment through roles/claims”, but as you said, I don’t "want to pay” for a whole month if I just need a one-time call. There are plenty of cases like that - for example, in real estate when you just need data about a few properties and don’t want to spend $500 for a month subscription. I also don’t think that users want to create an account and connect credit card for every MCP tool their AI assistant wants to use

So the question is still open - what other ways are developers using to handle payments besides OAuth/subscription?

[blustAI]

And just to be clear, even today OAuth/subs is not the only way. Since elicitation was introduced in the protocol a few months ago, we can send the user a payment link before executing a tool - kind of a built-in paywall. Unfortunately, not all major clients support elicitation yet, so for now we have to use hacks like creating additional tools in the MCP server just for payment confirmation.