Tiered pricing for MCP servers open source, pay-per-call, enterprise.
Hobbyists, production agents, and enterprises want three different deals. The trick is serving all three without the cheap tier eating the expensive ones — and without pretending a marketplace listing can cost $0.
MCP servers attract three distinct audiences. Hobbyists and evaluators want to try things at no cost. Production agent workloads want to pay for exactly what they use, programmatically. Enterprises want invoices, terms, and someone to call. One price can't serve all three — but three badly drawn tiers cannibalize each other.
Here's a tier structure that maps cleanly onto how MCP distribution actually works, and where the boundaries between tiers should sit.
Your free tier already exists: the open-source package
If your server is open source, you don't need to invent a free tier — self-hosting is the free tier. Anyone can install your package, supply their own infrastructure and upstream keys, and run it at no charge. That serves hobbyists completely while costing you nothing per user, because they bring their own compute.
Note what the free tier is not: a $0 price on your hosted listing. On Loomal, per-call pricing starts at $0.01 — there is no free per-call option, by design. The line between tiers is who runs the server, not a discounted price.
The middle tier: hosted, pay-per-call over x402
Your hosted endpoint, listed on Loomal with an x402 price, is the production tier. The buyer is anyone who wants your tool without operating it: agents discover the listing, see the per-call price, pay in USDC, and settlement lands on Base in about two seconds before the handler runs. No accounts to provision, no keys to rotate, no chargebacks.
What this tier sells is operations, not code. The self-hoster gets the same software free; the per-call customer pays you to run it — uptime, upstream API keys, scaling, updates. Price accordingly: your per-call rate covers marginal cost plus the operational burden the caller is avoiding.
The enterprise tier: terms, not technology
Some buyers can't do pay-as-you-go no matter how cheap it is — procurement wants a contract, an SLA, predictable invoicing, and sometimes a dedicated deployment. That's the enterprise tier, and it's negotiated directly rather than configured in a console.
x402 still helps here, as metering. Every call your infrastructure serves carries an Ed25519-signed receipt, so usage under an enterprise agreement is cryptographically auditable — you can invoice against provable call counts instead of arguing about dashboard numbers at renewal.
Draw the boundaries so tiers don't cannibalize
The free/paid boundary is operational effort. If self-hosting your server takes ten minutes and zero maintenance, sophisticated users will never pay for hosting — so the hosted tier must bundle something self-hosters can't trivially replicate: upstream data access under your keys, maintained infrastructure, or scale. If your server wraps a paid data source, this boundary draws itself.
The per-call/enterprise boundary is monthly spend. When a single customer's per-call volume reaches the price of a conversation, that's your signal to offer them committed terms — ideally priced so heavy usage is somewhat cheaper under contract, which keeps the incentive to graduate without making per-call feel like a penalty.
Start with two tiers, earn the third
Most maintainers should launch with exactly two tiers: the open-source package and a priced Loomal listing. Both are low-effort — claim your listing, connect the server, set one per-call price (minimum $0.01; the platform fee is 5% on settled transactions, currently waived).
Add the enterprise tier when a real customer asks for it, not before. A contract template written for a hypothetical buyer is wasted work; a signed-receipt usage history from your per-call tier is exactly the evidence that makes the eventual enterprise conversation easy.
FAQ
Can I offer a free trial of my hosted endpoint?
Not as a $0 price — Loomal's per-call minimum is $0.01 and there's no free per-call tier. The practical trial path is the open-source package: evaluators self-host it free, and at a cent per call, seriously evaluating your hosted endpoint costs an agent pennies anyway.
Won't open-sourcing the server kill my hosted revenue?
It hasn't in adjacent markets, because the buyers differ. Self-hosters were rarely going to pay; per-call customers are paying to not operate infrastructure, and agents in particular want a callable endpoint now, not a deployment project. The open package also functions as your distribution and trust channel.
Do I need different prices for hobbyist agents vs production agents?
No — the per-call price is the same field for everyone, and that's fine. Volume does the segmentation: a hobbyist's twenty calls cost twenty cents, a production workload's hundred thousand calls is real revenue, and the customer whose volume justifies a discount is your enterprise conversation.
How do enterprise customers pay if not per call?
However the contract says — conventional invoicing is normal at that tier. What x402 contributes is metering you can both trust: signed receipts per call give you auditable usage to invoice against, even when the payment itself moves through accounts payable rather than USDC per call.
Ship the two-tier version today.
Open source for self-hosters, one per-call price for everyone else.