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Report 03 · 2026-08-19

65 SaaS vendors ship an MCP server. 38 won't say which plan you need.

The Model Context Protocol is now a standard feature announcement: your software gets an MCP server, your AI assistant can finally reach your data. We checked 363 business-software vendors to see who actually ships one — and then asked a duller question nobody seems to answer. What does it cost, and which plan do you have to be on?

65 of 363vendors ship a first-party MCP server (17.9%)
38 of 65state no plan, tier or price anywhere in their own docs (58%)
3 of 65publish a date telling you when it shipped

What vendors say the server costs

Not stated anywhere in their own docs38
Works on every plan, including free10
Any paid plan9
A specific higher tier only8

Read the grey bar first. For 38 of the 65 servers, we could not find a single sentence — on the product page, in the docs, in the announcement, or on the pricing page — that says which plan includes the MCP server or what it costs. Not “free”, not “Enterprise only”, not “contact sales”. Nothing.

That silence is easy to misread as good news. The reasonable assumption is that the server comes with whatever you already pay for, and for many vendors that is probably true. But it is an assumption, and the 27 vendors who do spell it out show why it is not a safe one: 8 of them put the MCP server behind a specific higher tier. Miro requires Enterprise. Freshservice restricts it to Enterprise, in a beta, by request through your account manager. Tenable requires a Tenable One licence. Similarweb requires a subscription with API access. If you budgeted on the assumption that MCP came free with your seat, those four are the shape of the surprise.

The full list

Every row links to the vendor’s own page — the page we read to make the call. Ordered by how restrictive the requirement is, silent vendors last.

VendorWhat their own documentation says you need
Circle A specific higher tier only
Freshservice (EAP beta) A specific higher tier only
Miro A specific higher tier only
Seamless.ai A specific higher tier only
Serpstat A specific higher tier only
Similarweb A specific higher tier only
Tenable A specific higher tier only
Woodpecker A specific higher tier only
ActiveCampaign Any paid plan
Amplitude Any paid plan
Apollo Any paid plan
Databox (Under active development) Any paid plan
Descript Any paid plan
Frase Any paid plan
Gorgias (Beta) Any paid plan
Shippo Any paid plan
Wati Any paid plan
Beehiiv Works on every plan, including free
Bright Data Works on every plan, including free
ClickUp (Public beta) Works on every plan, including free
ElevenLabs Works on every plan, including free
Gamma Works on every plan, including free
MeetGeek Works on every plan, including free
monday.com Works on every plan, including free
Plesk (Very early beta) Works on every plan, including free
Replit (Beta) Works on every plan, including free
Wistia Works on every plan, including free
1Password (Beta) Not stated anywhere in their own docs
accessiBe Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Amplemarket Not stated anywhere in their own docs
BidX (Beta (invite only)) Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Brevo Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Bybit Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Clay Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Close Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Clutch Not stated anywhere in their own docs
CrowdStrike Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Customer.io Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Deel Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Dify Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Digit Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Envoy Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Fireflies.ai Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Freshworks Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Gusto (Live (read-only)) Not stated anywhere in their own docs
HiBob (Beta) Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Hostinger Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Hubstaff Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Jotform AI Agents Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Keeper Security Not stated anywhere in their own docs
lemlist Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Navan (Read-only) Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Pylon Not stated anywhere in their own docs
QuickBooks UK Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Reply.io Not stated anywhere in their own docs
respond.io Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Runpod Not stated anywhere in their own docs
ServiceM8 Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Softr Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Storylane Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Sunsama Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Todoist Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Webflow Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Wrike (v2 in beta) Not stated anywhere in their own docs
Xero (Live (remote server in beta)) Not stated anywhere in their own docs

Names in amber carry a status other than “Live” on the vendor’s own page — beta, early access, invite-only or read-only. That is 13 of 65: 1Password, BidX, ClickUp, Databox, Freshservice, Gorgias, Gusto, HiBob, Navan, Plesk, Replit, Wrike, Xero.

Why this is worth writing down

An MCP server is not a minor integration. It is the seam through which an AI assistant reads and, increasingly, writes your CRM records, your payroll data, your support queue. Deciding whether to switch it on is a security review, a procurement question and a budget line. All three of those need to know what plan it lands on.

There is also a pattern here worth naming. Announcing an MCP server is a positioning move: it says the vendor is ready for the agent era. Pricing it is a commercial commitment, and commitments constrain you later — particularly if you suspect that agent traffic will cost you real money and you would like to keep the option of charging for it. Announcing without pricing gets the positioning at none of the cost. 38 of 65 is what that looks like when you count it.

We are not accusing anyone of hiding a fee. Most of these servers are probably included, and several vendors told the world so in one clear sentence — monday.com and Wistia both did it in their FAQ, in about fifteen words. It took the rest of the field no more effort to stay quiet.

What we are not claiming

This is not a random sample of the software industry. These 363 vendors are the ones in our own partner database: business software skewed towards SMB and mid-market, weighted to sales, marketing, support, HR and infrastructure tools. A survey of enterprise platforms, or of developer tooling, would produce a different number. Treat 17.9% as the adoption rate in this corpus, not in SaaS at large.

“Not stated” means not stated, not unavailable. We read the vendor’s own pages. If the requirement is written down somewhere we did not reach — inside a logged-in help centre, in a sales deck, in an email to customers — we would not have seen it, and the vendor is welcome to point us at it. We will correct the row and say so.

Partial statements are coded as silent. Webflow’s MCP reference names a paid add-on, but only for one analytics capability inside the server, not for access to the server itself. Todoist’s guide notes that Claude Code needs a paid Claude plan — a fact about Anthropic’s pricing, not Todoist’s. Neither tells you what you need from that vendor, so both count as “not stated”. Reasonable people could code those two the other way.

Documentation moves. The sweep ran on 2026-08-17. Our partner database has grown to 374 vendors since; the 298 we found nothing for were checked on that date and not after. A server launched last week is not in this count.

Method

Starting set: the 363 vendors in our affiliate and partner database as of 2026-08-17. For each one we looked for a first-party MCP server through three machine signals: the official MCP registry (namespaces are reverse-DNS and DNS-verified, so a hit is strong first-party evidence), the vendor’s sitemap including docs., developer., help. and support. subdomains, and their /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt.

Every hit was then read by hand on the vendor’s own domain, because the signals produce false positives that matter:

The plan field records what the vendor writes, quoted where possible, and “not stated” where the pages say nothing. We did not estimate, infer from a comparable product, or ask sales. Earlier rounds of this scan used guessed URL patterns (/mcp, docs.x/mcp) and missed 21 servers that the registry-plus-sitemap sweep found, including Xero, CrowdStrike, monday.com, Amplitude and Webflow — which is a caution about any adoption figure built from URL guessing, including our own earlier ones.

Underlying data: 65 entries, each with a source URL on the vendor’s own domain, across 64 distinct domains. Our own MCP server, which we run over this corpus, is documented at /mcp/; what MCP is and how it works is explained at /ai/model-context-protocol/.

Citation

AIBuilder Marketplace, “65 SaaS vendors ship an MCP server. 38 won't say which plan you need.”, Report 03, 2026-08-19. Free to quote and reproduce with attribution (CC BY 4.0). The full table as structured data, or the list of 38 silent vendors on its own, is available on request — we would rather you republished it than re-scraped it.