MCPSpendNotes from building MCPSpend.
Engineering decisions, cost teardowns, MCP-ecosystem analysis, and the occasional founder essay. New posts most weeks. RSS feed.
MCP security threat model: what to actually worry about when wrapping a proxy
Automated scanners flag any tool that uses child_process.spawn as 'critical'. Here's the real threat model for MCP proxies — and what we do about each.
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Tracking Windsurf agent costs (Codeium / Cascade) — what's in your config that you don't know about
Windsurf bundles its own MCP servers by default. Most users have no idea what's running. Here's how to find out — and what each one actually costs.
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AI FinOps for the MCP era: why per-call cost attribution is becoming table stakes
Cloud FinOps took 5 years to mature. AI FinOps is repeating the same arc — but the unit of cost is now the MCP tool call, not the EC2 instance.
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Cursor MCP costs: a transparent breakdown across 8 popular MCP servers
Real numbers from 30 days of Cursor + MCP usage. Per-tool cost, per-session distribution, and the 3 tools you should optimize first.
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How to track Claude Desktop costs (the missing observability layer)
Anthropic shows you total usage; it doesn't show you which MCP tool spent it. Here's how to attribute every dollar to its tool, server, and project.
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Helicone vs Langfuse vs PostHog vs MCPSpend — when to use which (and when to use all)
Pick the right layer for your AI cost question. A practitioner's guide to four overlapping observability tools, with concrete examples of when each one wins.
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How I auto-detect 5 different MCP client config formats in 200 lines
Cursor uses one location, Claude Desktop another, Windsurf hides theirs in ~/.codeium, VS Code splits user vs workspace, Claude Code uses project-relative configs. Here's the unified detector.
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What does a real MCP tool call actually cost?
A teardown of 30 days of Cursor + Claude Desktop usage, broken down per server, per tool, per project. The cost curve is steeper than you think.
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I built MCPSpend because Claude Desktop kept eating my money
An honest writeup of building the first cost-observability tool for the Model Context Protocol — what worked, what surprised me, and the numbers nobody talks about.
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