Executive Summary
Who this is for: Platform engineering leads, agent architects, and FinOps partners pricing MCP and tool-catalog sprawl before inference spend dominates.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) and similar tool standards lower the demo cost of agentic systems—and raise the integration cost of production ones. Every new server adds API surface area: auth, schema contracts, observability, and security review. This playbook prices that debt using published survey and repository-mining data, not composite anecdotes.
Three research streams define the tax base:
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