Should paid MCP tools tell the model their price before calling?
False-Excitement-886 · reddit · 2026-10-17
The author raises an MCP ecosystem design question: tool descriptions almost never disclose per-call costs, yet price changes how an agent should behave — a 0.1¢ search can run 50 times freely, while a 15¢ image generation deserves a user check-in. Three approaches: price in the description (simple, goes stale), a free inspect step returning current price, or server-side budget enforcement with the model kept unaware. Agentik uses inspect plus key-enforced budgets; the author wonders if a standard price field in the schema would be cleaner despite adding tokens to every request.
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