How are you monetizing proprietary data through MCP?
Hi everyone,
I've been working quite a bit with MCP over the last months, and one question keeps coming back:
If you own a valuable dataset or paid API and expose it through MCP, how do you actually get paid when an agent uses it?
Today it usually still looks like this:
create account → choose a plan → add payment method → get API key → then the agent can call the API.
What I’m interested in is a different model:
An agent discovers a data product, sees that one call costs for example €0.25, has an approved budget, buys that single call and gets the result.
No separate subscription for every provider.
Full transparency: I’m currently building and testing in this space, so I’m trying to understand the provider side before making too many assumptions.
If you already sell data or API access:
What would stop you from trying this tomorrow?
Payment?
Authentication?
Licensing?
Accounting?
Trusting an agent with a budget?
Or simply no real customer demand yet?