mcp-context-cost

apify — context cost

10,452 tokens across 10 tools — moderate (5–15K). Measured 2026-09-16 under methodology v1.0.

An Anthropic request carries 4,793 of those tokens as tool definitions, and Claude counts those at 8,297.

   
server (self-reported) apify-mcp-server v0.15.7
status measured
tokenizer tiktoken / o200k_base
launch command npx -y @apify/actors-mcp-server
isolation docker · public.ecr.aws/docker/library/node:22-slim · network bridge · linux/amd64 · network enabled for package fetch; clean FS, no host credentials
env vars supplied APIFY_TOKEN
canonical SHA-256 4dd4565165c7066d8e8ef666f79cd8b323bad3d7f66b4d34fbe769f07e979453
category vendor-official
source https://github.com/apify/apify-mcp-server

Where the tokens are

tool tokens share description input schema output schema
search-actors 2,226 21.3% 610 504 1,026
call-actor 1,875 17.9% 377 496 922
fetch-actor-details 1,534 14.7% 219 262 983
get-actor-run 1,290 12.3% 192 108 922
abort-actor-run 1,165 11.1% 112 69 922
search-apify-docs 722 6.9% 251 291 104
get-dataset-items 664 6.4% 130 289 182
report-problem 347 3.3% 95 163 30
get-key-value-store-record 341 3.3% 102 73 99
fetch-apify-docs 286 2.7% 110 64 48

Each tool is tokenized on its own, so the parts do not sum exactly to the whole: the array adds its own brackets and commas, and the tokenizer merges tokens across object boundaries. The badge number is always the count of the whole array, never a sum of parts.

What this costs on Claude

Measured 2026-09-14 against claude-opus-5 via Anthropic’s count_tokens (method tools-delta/v1).

  tokens  
o200k, full capture 10,452 the badge number — every byte tools/list returned
o200k, Anthropic fields only 4,793 54.1% of the capture is MCP-only metadata
Claude, same fields 8,297 0.79× the badge number

An Anthropic tool definition carries name, description, and input_schema and nothing else, so title, annotations, outputSchema, execution, and icons are dropped before the request — that is the second row. The third row is the same tools counted by Anthropic, which is larger than the second because Anthropic’s tokenizer is denser on this content than o200k_base and the API adds its own framing (at most 328 tokens of it fixed, measured against a single minimal tool). The two effects run in opposite directions, which is why the Claude number is not a fixed multiple of the badge.

Over time

date tokens tools release measured in change
2026-08-16 10,426 10 not recorded not recorded —
2026-08-19 10,426 10 not recorded docker no change
2026-09-04 10,452 10 0.15.4 docker +26
2026-09-16 10,452 10 0.15.7 docker no change

Some of these sweeps predate the isolation column, so the conditions they were measured under are not on record.

Full series: results/history.csv.

Re-derive it

npx -y mcp-context-cost verify results/apify/measurement.json

That re-tokenizes the published capture and checks the count and the hash. If it disagrees with the badge, the badge is wrong — open an issue and it gets corrected.

Badge JSON · All servers · Leaderboard · Methodology