A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "The MCP Maintenance Bill Depends On How You Built It," Kin Lane, October 28, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/28/the-mcp-maintenance-bill-depends-on-how-you-built-it/
Marisol ran platform engineering at a mid-sized company that sold scheduling software, and she opened the post on Wednesday because someone in finance had forwarded it with no comment. That was worse than a comment.
Her team had shipped an MCP server in the spring. Two engineers had written it in a few days, against the SDK and a couple of internal endpoints, and nobody had put a line for it in the next budget. She read the opening with her jaw set. The water main and the supply line under the sink were the commenter's metaphor, and the author was granting the point: teams were now paying for two surfaces, forever.
Then came the part she had been dreading. The post split the work into two kinds of server. A derived one is generated from the contract and a short set of rules. The other kind is code someone wrote against whatever was lying around. She stopped on the line that said the first is a build artifact, and the second is a second product.
She did not enjoy being sorted. Her server had good names, as far as she could tell, and she thought the author was a little too pleased with his own taxonomy. Plenty of API teams did not have a complete OpenAPI with examples and good descriptions. Telling them to fund the contracts first sounded like telling a person with a leaking roof to go build a better roof. She said so out loud to the empty room.
But the sentence about cost stuck. She read it twice: a hand-written MCP server costs extra, every release, forever. She thought about the last two API releases. In the second one, a field had been renamed, and the server's tool description still described the old behavior for three weeks before anyone noticed. Nobody had logged that as a cost. It had been absorbed into someone's afternoon.
She also felt a small, unwelcome recognition at the catalog numbers. The post said 228 servers mixed naming styles inside a single tool list, and called it what hand-writing looks like when more than one person does it. Two people had written hers. She had not actually read the whole tool list in a month.
She did not agree that every team should write the rules down, or not yet. A style guide felt like more governance than a server this small deserved. But the line about exposure bothered her more than she wanted it to: generating a tool for every endpoint is the cheap way to derive a server and the expensive way to run one. Hers did not expose everything, which she supposed was either discipline or luck.
She did not call a meeting or rewrite anything. She opened a blank spreadsheet and pasted in the tool names from her server, one per row. Next to each she added a column and, for each one, wrote the OpenAPI operation it came from, or left the cell empty if she could not name one. By the time her coffee went cold, four cells were empty, and she thought she knew who to ask about them.