paperops

Observability control plane for Paper's MCP. A pass-through proxy that sits between your MCP clients and Paper's local server, metering, attributing, and live-streaming every tool call. Paper bills per MCP call — and the calls are made by an agent, at a speed you were never meant to watch. paperops is where you watch them.

Features

• Live tape — every MCP call as it happens: client, tool, the artboard or file it acted on, status, latency, size. Sort it, filter it, slice it by file tabs.

• Call inspector — click any row: plain-language facts, a latency sparkline against recent calls of the same tool, and the raw request/response one click (and one copy button) away.

• Budgets — weekly quotas from Paper's real plans (free/pro), per-file and per-client limits, runaway-session alerts. Declarative JSON, hot-reloaded, warn-only.

• Timelapse — every screenshot your agent takes, as a gallery. Each one names the artboard it is of and the client that took it, in the order they happened.

• Light and dark — follows your system until you choose; D toggles.

• Passive by design — zero MCP calls of its own. The meter never spends what it measures.

• Private by design — payloads and snapshots live in memory only, the on-disk ledger is metadata, the dashboard binds to localhost and makes zero external requests — fonts included.

• Zero dependencies — one Bun process, one HTML file. bunx paperops and you're watching.

Related MCP server: MCPSpend

Run

bunx paperops
# paperops · proxy :29980/mcp → http://127.0.0.1:29979/mcp · dashboard http://127.0.0.1:29980/

Requires the Paper desktop app running (it serves the real MCP on 127.0.0.1:29979).

paperops --help lists the flags — --port, --target, --version. From a clone, bun dev starts the same server without the CLI wrapper.

Wire your clients through it

This repo ships a project-scoped .mcp.json: open it with Claude Code and the paperops server is already wired through the proxy — approve it once and every call appears on the tape at http://127.0.0.1:29980/ in real time.

To observe sessions in other projects, point them at the proxy too:

claude mcp add --transport http paperops http://127.0.0.1:29980/mcp

Or copy the .mcp.json entry into that project.

What gets recorded

One JSONL line per call in ~/.paperops/ledger.jsonl:

{"id":267,"ts":"2026-07-28T04:47:14.159Z","session":"8b252f7c-…","client":"claude-code","rpc":"tools/call","tool":"write_html","fileId":"01KYJQ…","fileName":"paperops","nodeId":"T5-0","nodeName":"paperops — calls (light)","status":200,"ms":40.6,"argsBytes":2333,"resultBytes":3563,"error":null}

• Attribution comes free: the proxy reads clientInfo.name from initialize payloads and tags every subsequent call in that session, and learns artboard names from get_basic_info responses in transit — so a line says who made the call and what it acted on, without either being asked for. Clients already connected when paperops starts show as unknown, because the name only ever travels in initialize — reconnect them and it clears. Restarting paperops itself is safe: it replays the map from the ledger.

• The 7-day meter counts tools/call requests against your weekly quota — which comes from budgets.json (week, or the plan preset). It survives restarts by replaying the ledger.

• The ledger is an audit trail: the exact sequence of every call — names, timing, sizes, attribution. Call payloads live in memory only (privacy by design), so sessions can be audited from disk but not re-executed.

Budgets

~/.paperops/budgets.json — declarative limits, hot-reloaded on save:

{
  "plan": "pro",
  "budgets": [
    { "scope": "file", "match": "paperops", "limit": 2000, "note": "design project" },
    { "scope": "client", "match": "claude-code", "limit": 50000 }
  ]
}

• plan — "free" or "pro"; sets the weekly quota to Paper's official number (100 or 1M calls/week, per paper.design/pricing) and a sensible session alert (50 / 200 — a heavy design session measures ≈100 calls). Defaults to free: the Free user is the one a silent meter hurts most.

• week / sessionAlert — explicit overrides for the plan-derived values.

• budgets — one rule per line: scope (file or client), match (exact string — a file name or id, or a client name; no regex/glob), limit (weekly calls), optional note for humans. Matching by file name reads better but detaches if the file is renamed in Paper; ids survive renames.

States: ok → warning at 80% (chrome yellow) → exceeded (red), shown on the header meter, tab counts, and the budgets rail section. v1 warns, never blocks.

Config

Nothing Paper-specific lives in the proxy path — point PAPEROPS_TARGET at any streamable-HTTP MCP server and it meters that instead.

Known limitation: JSON-RPC batch requests pass through untouched but meter as a single request (no per-call accounting). No supported client sends batches today, and recent MCP revisions removed batching from the protocol.