Comment by CSMastermind a day ago
I wonder if there's a market for someone figuring out how to build monetization into MCP or something similar.
Being able to offer a helpful API to the world and just getting paid whenever someone uses it would be really nice.
At the moment you have to process the payment "yourself" (even if you use a third party for that), issue an API key, etc.
The market for MCP servers is the same as the market for rest endpoints: its a delivery mechanism for the underlying service.
I don't think you can make money on them, they are too simple to clone, but you can make money charging for the API. If you have a per usage license making an MCP is a very obvious choice - if you charge per seat it is mostly a question of how how sticky you are versus the competition.
I see value in a pay-per-execution model. I run a service which has a lot of proprietary data. Right now, if Anthropic/OpenAI wanted to use that data in their responses, they need to find me, setup an account, plug it into their chatbot, and return the data to an end user.
With some kind of MCP tip jar, they could extract the data they need and pay $0.02 for the service.
It would remove a lot of friction in the system, and could generate revenues for content & data creators.
I reckon the target market would have to be non-developers (because MCP servers are easily reproducible with LLMs, they even encourage it in the docs), and you wouldn't even mention MCP. Just have a list of tools which you can optionally enable in the chat client