Solo Dev Reveals What It Takes to Get an MCP Server Approved by Anthropic

Capable_Advisor5282 · reddit · 2026-07-30

A solo developer shares a detailed breakdown of getting a travel-logistics MCP server approved into the Claude directory in 20 days.

Submission & Review Process

Requires a Team/Enterprise org portal access, costing solo devs €52/month for a minimum of 2 seats.
Automated checks connect live to count tools/resources, strictly validating annotations.title, read-only hints, and honest descriptions.
A public privacy policy and landing page are mandatory. Proxying partner APIs with permission is accepted.
Providing exact positive and negative prompts for tool triggers likely speeds up the review process.

Engineering Gotchas

Tool Caching: claude.ai caches the tool SET at connect time. Existing users won't see schema or widget updates until they manually refresh. Finalize toolsets before distribution.
Traffic Filtering: Expect a crawler swarm (2000 requests/day) from scanners post-publishing. Filter them by UA/IP to keep usage stats accurate.
Rate Limiting & Deploys: Anthropic uses a shared egress IP pool, so per-IP limits will throttle real users. Implement a drain on SIGTERM during deployments to avoid killing active tool calls.
Directory Tiers: Community (automated) vs. Verified (manual review), with no public upgrade path yet.

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