The State of MCP in 2025: Who's Building What and Why It Matters

This is an opinion piece about the MCP ecosystem based on my observations and research building in this space for over a year.

Jupm to MCP Community in Numbers for quantitative insights.

Landscape

MCP ecosystem is composed of the following types of companies and software:

• MCP-capable hosted clients. Some companies in this space include Glama, TypingMind, and of course Claude, OpenAI, and Mistral (Le Chat).

• MCP-capable local clients. Msty, Goose, Cursor. There are many.

• Production hosting for MCP (i.e., hosted by you, designed to use by others). Companies: FastMCP, Gram (Speakeasy).

• Self-hosting for MCP (i.e., private servers designed for your personal use). Companies: Glama, Cloudflare.

• MCP-aware LLM gateways. Glama, Cloudflare

• MCP-aware local LLM gateways. Lunar, Portkey, MCPJungle

• MCP registries. Glama, MCP get, PulseMCP, and many others.

• Local hosting for MCP. Docker MCP Toolkit, MCP Nest

• MCP-driven automations platform. Glama, mcp.run (dead), but also traditional workflow automation platforms like n8n, Zapier, and others.

• MCP integration platforms (i.e., already deployed MCP endpoints ready to use). Companies: Smithery, Pipedream, Toolrouter

• MCP endpoints. Companies Bright Data, Exa.ai, and many others

• MCP-enabled browser extensions. web-to-mcp

• MCP devtools. MCPJam

• Observability for MCP. Companies: MCPCat, Sentry, Datadog.

This is a non-exhaustive list, but it captures most of the categories that make up the MCP ecosystem.

Trends, Problems and Opportunities

Many abandoned or pivoted

At the start of the MCP boom, there were a lot more companies and across many more categories. I keep a list of every MCP-related website in the ecosystem. There are 81 companies on that list. As I am writing this article, at least half of those websites are now taking to dead domains or they have pivoted. From what I can tell, most of these were clients, registries, and hosting services.

There are several reasons why I think this happened:

• For the longest time, there were more people building in the MCP ecosystem than there were users.

• Many were bootstrapped and did not have resources to keep up with the fast pace of the MCP ecosystem.

• Many underestimated the complexity of the problem, e.g., secure hosting of untrusted code is a very difficult problem to solve.

Lots of consolidation

Related to the above, MCP hosting/gateway/auth/security companies (that initially started as one or another) are gradually expanding to become platforms of everything.

This is not unexpected. We are seeing companies like Glama, MintMCP, TrueFoundry, etc. all expanding to cover deployments, observability & governance. These are the pillars of the MCP ecosystem. This is also why standalone categories like auth, observability, and security are becoming less relevant – these are now features of the said platforms.

Remote servers won

Our survey shows that consumers overwhelmingly prefer remote MCP servers. The main reason is the ease of use and security considerations.

With regards to ease of use, most users do not want (do not know how to) run local MCP servers due to the complexity of the process (docker, uv, etc.). I think an opportunity remains to build better tools for running local-only servers locally, but I foresee most users using remote MCP servers for everything else.

With regards to security, local binaries are more risky – they have access to the local machine. For this to improve, we would need a better way to validate integrity of the MCP servers. I don't see this happening unless the likes of Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI launch MCP registry and vet the authors of the MCP servers (some of these efforts are already underway).

The Rise of "MCP-First" SaaS APIs

Companies that previously sold data via APIs are now building/hosting their own MCP servers. The model (pay-per-request) has not changed, but the distribution channel has. Examples:

• Bright Data – allows to search, navigate, and extract web data.

• Exa.ai – fast and efficient web context for coding agents.

• Tavily – search and navigate the web.

• context7 – up-to-date Docs for LLMs and AI code editors.

I foresee this category expanding a lot in the next year. Any company that was successful in selling their data via APIs is well positioned to win in this space.

In terms of opportunity, the big question is whether companies in this category will choose to self-host their MCP servers or use platforms like Glama, FastMCP, Gram, etc. The latter provides hosting, observability, and governance out of the box. The former allows for more control and customization.

Monetization Models

Related to the above, one of the most frequent conversations I have with MCP server authors is about monetizing their MCP servers.

The aforementioned companies (Bright Data, Exa.ai, Tavily, etc.) are effectively charging for the MCP server usage based on the underlying API usage. Perhaps this is sufficient. However, personally I was hoping that at least one of the MCP hosting companies would come up with a better model, e.g., a unified billing model that gives access to any MCP server in the registry without having to tinker with API keys or pay each provider separately. This remains a big opportunity.

Furthermore, there remains a question of how to reward open-source MCP server authors. If we don't solve this problem, we will end up with a lot of abandoned MCP servers. We (Glama) are working on a revenue sharing model for open-source MCP server authors that will be announced soon. I'll update this article when we launch.

Enterprise "Intranet" Registries

As mentioned earlier, trust is a major issue in the MCP ecosystem. We (Glama) are seeing a large uptick of large enterprises and government agencies asking to provide them with software to host, manage, and monitor MCP servers on their own infrastructure. These are effectively private registries of audited and allow-listed MCP servers.

This is a big opportunity for open source projects to win.

Shift from "Chat" to "Background Agents"

At the beginning, most of the MCP usage was in the context of chat, i.e., users including MCP servers to help them with their tasks (calendar, email, search, etc.). However, we are seeing a rise of agents that depend on MCP servers to perform tasks in workflows like CI/CD pipelines, data processing, etc.

Big opportunity for companies that can effectively host MCP servers and make them easy to use in these workflows.

MCP Community in Numbers

Reddit

r/mcp – 80k members

Reddit community received 7.3m visitors in 2025, peaking in July 2025 with 1.19m visitors. The community published 19.3k posts and 79.8k comments.

Discord

MCP Discord – 9.5k members

Discord server experienced a steady growth throughout 2025.

MCP Servers

Total of 11,415 MCP servers were registered in 2025.

GitHub

We tracked a total of 85k GitHub commits in 2025, with the most contributions observed in September peaking at 22k. These were made by a total of 15,294 GitHub users.

NPM

Across the entire ecosystem, MCP servers and devtools (excluding frameworks to avoid double counting), are receiveing 31M weekly downloads.

The following are thst most downloaded MCP related packages:

Google Trends

According to Google Trends, interest in Model Context Protocol peaked around August and declined in early December.

Venture Capital

At least $73 million were raised by companies building directly in the MCP ecosystem.

Final Thoughts

We're past the initial chaos, but still early. The companies that survive the next twelve months will likely define this space for years to come.

If you're building in this space–or thinking about it–I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at frank@glama.ai or find me on Discord.