mcptokens 1.0.1

172 tokens in your agent's harness. One MCP tool that counts the tool-definition cost of any other MCP server.

mcptokens

576 tokens in your agent's harness. One tool, inspect, that counts the tool-definition cost of any other MCP server (stdio or Streamable HTTP) before you enable it.

pip install mcptokens

---

Why

When your agent enables a new MCP server, its tools enter the agent's context on every turn. The cost compounds fast. mcptokens lets the agent ask is this server cheap enough? before flipping the switch.

Transports

Same tool, same response shape:

• stdio (default): spawn a local process and speak JSON-RPC on its stdin/stdout.
• streamable_http: POST initialize and tools/list to a remote MCP endpoint per MCP 2025-03-26. Server may reply via application/json (one message) or text/event-stream.

How

Add mcptokens to your agent's MCP config (Claude Code, Pi, OpenCode, Codex, ...). The agent gains one tool:

inspect(command=["python", "-m", "some_mcp_server"])
# stdio spawn argv, same as your MCP config

inspect(command=["hound"])
# pre-installed binary

inspect(
    transport="streamable_http",
    url="http://localhost:8080/mcp",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer ..."},  # optional
)
# remote MCP server

# Returns the same JSON shape every call:
# {ok, server, tool_count, wire_total_tokens,
#  tools: [{name, total}], encoding, elapsed_ms, version}

wire_total_tokens is the number to report. Use it BEFORE enabling a candidate server: a large value means don't enable.

The numbers

Self-cost on wire	576 tokens of cl100k_base
Tools exposed	1, named inspect
Transports	stdio, streamable_http
Cross-platform	Linux, macOS, Windows
Python	3.11+
Imports	stdlib, tiktoken, mcp

Install

pip install mcptokens

Add mcptokens to your agent's mcpServers / mcp_servers. Done.

CLI (debug surface)

mcptokens python -m some_mcp_server     # human table
mcptokens --json python -m some_mcp_server   # pipeline-friendly JSON
mcptokens --timeout 30 python -m srv    # custom spawn, custom timeout
mcptokens serve                         # run as an MCP server

Flag	Default	Purpose
--encoding	cl100k_base	cl100k_base or o200k_base
--timeout	15	Per-server timeout in seconds (1 to 60)
--json	false	Output JSON instead of the table

License

MIT. pip install mcptokens from the canonical PyPI index.