MCP — the protocol that lets an AI agent call real tools — is open and free. The servers themselves are mostly free too: point-of-use code on GitHub, or a small npm/pip package you run yourself. And yet a small industry of MCP marketplaces has shown up charging monthly fees just to hand you access to servers you could often set up in five minutes on your own.

What people are actually paying for

Charged MCP servers on today's marketplaces range from about $19/month up to $149/month for enterprise tiers. One popular documentation-search server bills per query — $0.009 a search, or $9/month for a 1,000-credit subscription. Another marketplace's free plan caps you at 25 tool calls a month before pushing you to a paid tier for more.

None of that is automatically a ripoff — some of it is genuinely paying for hosted infrastructure, uptime, and maintenance someone else is doing for you. But a lot of what's being sold is just access to a config you could write yourself: a repo URL, an API key, and a command to run it. The protocol doesn't require a middleman; the middleman is a convenience some marketplaces sell on top of something that's already free underneath.

The free version of the same thing

In Aegis's Connectors page, adding an MCP server costs nothing and doesn't require our catalog at all:

Search the public MCP Registry for a server by name and connect it directly.
Install straight from a GitHub repo — paste the URL, Aegis handles the rest.
Connect a hosted server by URL (Streamable HTTP) if someone's already running it.
Paste a raw mcpServers JSON config if you've got one from anywhere else.

All four of those are on the free plan, not gated behind anything. The only thing Aegis's own paid tier ($9.99/month) actually sells is a curated, maintained catalog — connectors picked, configured, and kept up to date for you. If you're happy finding and wiring up your own, you never need to pay for that at all.

When paying is actually the right call

To be fair to the marketplaces charging for this: real hosting costs real money, and if a server needs infrastructure you don't want to run yourself — rate-limited APIs, background jobs, something that has to stay up 24/7 — paying someone else to host it is a legitimate trade, not a scam. The distinction worth keeping in mind is just this: are you paying for compute and uptime you'd otherwise have to manage, or are you paying for access to a config file that was already free to begin with? Only one of those needs a subscription.

Sources: DEV Community — Pricing an MCP Server in 2026, ZenML LLMOps Database — PulseMCP pricing, MCPBundles pricing