Study finds GitHub MCP tools cost 59,417 tokens

An analysis of token costs for AI agent capabilities found that Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers add tens of thousands of prompt tokens to every request due to full tool definitions and large returned objects. Testing on GitHub tasks showed that traditional CLI tools and skills used significantly fewer tokens and cost much less than default MCP configurations. The authors suggest scoping MCP tools, capping response sizes, or using a Tool Search feature to reduce these context window overheads. Open article →