MCP Gateway

One gateway between your AI and every tool it needs, without flooding the context window.

MCP Gateway is a single Rust binary that sits between an AI client and all of its tools. Connect MCP servers and REST APIs behind it, and the agent sees a compact meta-surface of 9 to 17 tools instead of every backend definition. It discovers and calls backend tools on demand. A small live-agent benchmark found no completed-task token saving from that extra hop, so the value is catalog capacity plus policy and routing—not a blanket token claim. See Benchmarks.

Personal and noncommercial use is free, including running the full gateway. Running it commercially needs a commercial license.

The problem this removes

Every MCP tool an AI client connects costs roughly 150 tokens of context overhead, loaded into every request whether the tool gets used or not. Connect 20 servers with 100 tools between them and you spend about 15,000 tokens before the conversation starts. Context limits then force a second cost: you have to decide up front which tools to connect and leave the rest out, so the agent makes worse decisions because it cannot reach data you chose not to load.

MCP Gateway moves the full catalog out of the exposed tool list. The agent loads a small fixed set of meta-tools, searches with gateway_search_tools, and invokes a backend tool with gateway_invoke. This creates room for larger catalogs, but the extra search hop can cost more tokens and time on a completed task.

flowchart LR
    AI["AI client(Claude, Cursor, ...)"]
    subgraph GW["MCP Gateway (single binary)"]
        META["Compact meta-surface9-17 tools"]
        DISC{"Discover on demandgateway_search_toolsgateway_invoke"}
    end
    T1["MCP backendTavily (stdio)"]
    T2["MCP backendContext7 (http)"]
    C1["REST capabilityGitHub"]
    C2["REST capabilityStripe"]
    Cn["110+ capabilities"]

    AI -->|"9-17 tool defs"| META
    META --> DISC
    DISC --> T1
    DISC --> T2
    DISC --> C1
    DISC --> C2
    DISC --> Cn

Quick Start

Four commands:

brew trust --tap MikkoParkkola/tap   # Homebrew 6.0+
brew install MikkoParkkola/tap/mcp-gateway   # 1. install
mcp-gateway setup wizard --configure-client  # 2. import existing servers + wire up clients
mcp-gateway serve                            # 3. run
mcp-gateway doctor                           # 4. verify everything is healthy

That is it. Your AI clients now talk to the gateway, and the gateway routes to every backend you already had configured, at a flat 11 tools instead of ~150 — 11 is the default HTTP configuration counted for an administrator; an ordinary client is shown four fewer. Start with gateway_search_tools from your AI client to find any backend tool, then invoke it with gateway_invoke.

Nothing to import yet? mcp-gateway init --with-examples writes a working gateway.yaml with public capabilities so you can confirm the gateway is alive before adding your own servers.

Or tell your AI assistant (recommended):

Read https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/mcp-gateway and install mcp-gateway to consolidate all my MCP servers behind one gateway

Your agent will install the binary, run the setup wizard, import your existing MCP servers, and wire itself up. This works in Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, and any AI with terminal access.

Install