Building Your Organization’s MCP Gateway:
Pros, Cons, and Costs Calculated
How This Page Will Help You
When larger organizations first begin experimenting with MCP servers, they may consider developing their own solutions to secure, manage, and monitor their MCP and AI deployments.
Before taking this entirely feasible approach, it’s essential to fully assess the costs, complexity, and commitment required to build, maintain, upgrade, and support an MCP gateway that is both effective and reliable.
This page helps you compare the pros and cons – and calculate the costs – of building your own MCP gateway versus using a pre-built platform such as MCP Manager.
Key Considerations:
Keeping Up With The Protocol
The Model Context Protocol is constantly changing.
Organizations building their own MCP gateways will need to invest resources continuously and irregularly to respond to changes in the MCP specification and maintain compliance.
Unlike many IT projects, building tools for MCP requires a high level of ongoing investment.
Time To Value
Building your own MCP gateway gives you greater control over your roadmap, timescales, and the extent to which your gateway aligns with any workflows that are unique to your organization.
However, the foundational components of an MCP gateway (such as identity management, scaled deployments, and baseline security) are complex. Building them is likely to cause repeated delays to your go-live, which can slow down your AI adoption and ROI.
Support, R&D, & Enhancements
Building your own MCP gateway lets you tailor it to your organization’s needs and integrate capabilities at your own pace.
However, as business use of AI and MCP matures, you’ll need to continuously expand your gateway’s functionality to meet internal demands, match third-party advances, and dedicate more of your team’s time – or even expand your team – to provide comprehensive user support.
Your Biggest Hurdles To Overcome
There are some aspects of building an MCP gateway that are both unavoidable and extremely challenging. Here are the three capabilities that are essential to build and most likely to slow you down.
Identity Management & OAuth
Managing access to resources via MCP servers is one of the most time-consuming and troublesome parts of creating an MCP gateway. Your gateway must act as an OAuth provider, assuming all the responsibilities of an authorization server.
You will need to devise and implement reliable structures and processes for token management, mapping, and rotation that work across MCP servers with varying authorization requirements and approaches.
Proxying & Compatibility
Building a proxying system that can reliably act as an MCP client and server – as both parts of the MCP “handshake” – requires a deep understanding of the MCP specification, and continual, rapid adaptations to inevitable changes to it.
In addition, your gateway needs to proxy requests and responses between different MCP servers with different connection methods and deployment types. Cross-compatibility is essential, but far from easy. It is an endless, time-consuming, and labor-intensive process.
Managed, Scalable MCP Server Deployments
MCP servers require additional packaging and tooling to meet the needs of large organizations for control, security, and scalability. Remotely deployed servers introduce concerns around data security. Workstation (local) deployments are unscalable by default, inaccessible to non-technical users, and come with their own set of security risks.
Before security becomes a practical issue, you will need to build tooling within your gateway to enable “Managed” MCP server deployments, which offer the best balance of control and scalability.
MCP Gateway Cost Calculator
Select features. Build cost based on eng hours and salary. Ongoing splits complexity-based costs and user support.
How The Calculator Works
Your Initial Build Cost
The initial build cost = the approximate number of engineering hours required to build each feature you select from the list above, multiplied by a “rough hourly rate”. The hourly rate is based on your provided engineer salary, divided by 1840 (average US annual working hours, factoring in weekends, 20 days vacation, and public holidays).
These figures also factor in time for:
- Design (+12% of engineering hours per feature)
- Product Management (+15% of engineering hours per feature)
- QA and Testing (+20% of engineering hours per feature)
Your Ongoing Annual Costs
Ongoing costs are split into two parts:
User Support:
Scales moderately with your total number of MCP server users, using a nonlinear formula:
User Support Cost = Base support cost at 20 users × (Number of users ÷ 20) raised to the power of 0.6 (sublinear scaling), with a minimum cost floor to cover baseline support effort.
Platform Maintenance, Upgrades, and Maintaining MCP Spec Compliance:
40% × “Initial Build Cost”. Uses the “Initial Build Cost” as a proxy for platform complexity, and therein the amount of work required to maintain, upgrade the platform, and maintain its compliance with the MCP spec.
Key Pros and Cons of Building Your Own MCP Gateway
Pros:
- Complete control over the platform’s design, functionality, and workflows
- Maintain control over hosting and data storage
- Enables greater responsiveness to organization-specific requirements
- Flexibility to scale infrastructure selectively and optimize for selected use cases
- Freedom to prioritize features based on internal priorities
- Not dependent upon vendor stability
Cons:
- Higher initial costs and resources required
- Higher ongoing costs and resources required
- Slower time to deployment
- High likelihood of repeated delays against your planned go-live date
- Additional resource requirements for user support
- Maintaining MCP spec compliance requires significant ongoing investment and vigilance
- Creates a substantial support and maintenance burden
- Difficult to maintain parity with vendor solutions
- High likelihood of large-scale feature requirements emerging periodically as AI/MCP use evolves
- Dependence on in-house engineering personnel and specific staff retention
- Higher risk of technical debt
Summary:
Building your own MCP gateway internally may address concerns about 3rd-party data storage and vendor stability. Internal development also gives you greater control over the nature and roadmap of your gateway. However, an MCP gateway is precisely the kind of platform that is ill-suited to internal development, particularly for early adopters of MCP servers.
Many of the foundational elements of an MCP gateway are tricky to build, making go-live delays likely. The MCP specification is updated frequently; you will need significant, ongoing investment to maintain compliance.
Understanding which features and functionality will add real value, versus what is a distraction, is a burden best left to a vendor with a pool of customers to aggregate findings from and spend their own time and resources discovering and iterating.
Overall, the pros of building your own MCP gateway are far outweighed by the cons.
Detailed Examination: Building an MCP Gateway vs. Using MCP Manager
This table provides a more detailed examination of the various aspects of building, maintaining, improving, and supporting your own MCP Gateway, compared to using an MCP gateway like MCP Manager.
| Criteria | Building Your Own Gateway | Using MCP Manager |
|---|---|---|
| Overall Costs & Resources | You will already understand that the initial investment in building your own MCP gateway is far greater than the cost of a pre-built solution. However, because AI and MCP are still relatively new technologies, your ongoing costs are also likely to remain far higher than the cost of paying annual fees for a solution provided by a vendor. | The costs of using a solution like MCP Manager are far lower than those of building your own. This applies to both initial and ongoing costs (use the calculator above for a more detailed comparison). You should also consider the cost of pulling resources and talent away from more strategic, value-adding activities. |
| Customization | Complete control over your MCP gateway/management platform’s design, architecture, policies, and alignment with internal workflows. However, there is a clear price to pay to keep pace with internal feature demands, while ensuring stability and balancing this with demands for greater flexibility and customization from various teams. | While your gateway is not “bespoke”, you still have a wide range of customization options to fit the platform with your organization’s style, structure, and workflows. Feature requests are triaged based on cross-customer demand. Your MCP gateway offers a refined set of functionality, isn’t bloated, is stable, and stays up to date with the best MCP gateways and management platforms the market has to offer. |
| Maintaining MCP Spec Compliance | The MCP spec is constantly evolving. Your team will need to stay ahead of its developments, and rapidly update your platform to conform to it, in order for your MCP ecosystem to stay functional and prevent extensive downtime. | As shapers of the MCP specification, the MCP Manager team stays ahead of changes to the MCP spec for you, ensuring continuous compliance and compatibility. |
| Identity Management & Auth | Handling identity management, authorization, and authentication in AI and Model Context Protocol systems is complex and varied. Getting these components of your platform to work correctly is crucial, but it will likely be time-consuming and will probably cause repeated delays to your go-live. | MCP Manager comes ready with OAuth, RBAC, identity management, integrations with identity providers (IdP) for SSO, and supports SCIM to make user provisioning and de-provisioning seamless, easy, and reliable. |
| Support | You must create internal processes, resources, and roles to provide comprehensive support to everyone using your platform. Handling support internally gives you more control over your teams’ experience. Still, costs, resource demands, and satisfaction management can quickly become a drain, pulling resources away from initiatives that are more strategic and deliver greater ROI. | MCP Manager provides comprehensive support for you and your team with clear SLAs. This includes 1-1 dedicated engineer support and a full range of services for onboarding, consultation, implementation, and training, with additional services for bespoke development and deployment. |
| Regulatory Compliance | You can ensure that AI and MCP data use align with your organization’s broader approach to regulations (such as those set by GDPR, HIPAA, GLBA, FCRA, and FCA). However, building a system to enforce compliance across your AI/MCP ecosystem is an intricate, complex project that requires significant upfront and ongoing investment; the risks of failure can be costly and highly damaging to your reputation. | You will have a certain degree of dependency upon the vendor to ensure regulatory compliance, and full alignment with organization-specific approaches can be more difficult. However, MCP Manager has a sophisticated system of contact “tagging” and compliance enforcement to ensure that AI and MCP use of data is compliant with regulations. |