mcp-context-cost

firecrawl — context cost

9,561 tokens across 27 tools — moderate (5–15K). Measured 2026-08-16 under methodology v1.0.

   
server (self-reported) firecrawl-fastmcp v3.24.0
status measured
tokenizer tiktoken / o200k_base
launch command npx -y firecrawl-mcp
isolation docker · public.ecr.aws/docker/library/node:22-slim · network bridge · network enabled for package fetch; clean FS, no host credentials
env vars supplied FIRECRAWL_API_KEY
canonical SHA-256 3b7694bcedabac9706eba0c497c1fb4591121db0fd25e4e87e4802a001e34cd6
category vendor-official
source https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server

Where the tokens are

tool tokens share description schema
firecrawl_search 1,391 14.5% 261 1,082
firecrawl_crawl 911 9.5% 98 769
firecrawl_scrape 874 9.1% 226 600
firecrawl_interact 819 8.6% 99 675
firecrawl_parse 630 6.6% 170 413
firecrawl_feedback 565 5.9% 55 464
firecrawl_search_feedback 501 5.2% 140 315
firecrawl_monitor_create 380 4.0% 134 204
firecrawl_research_search_papers 346 3.6% 90 208
firecrawl_developer_search 259 2.7% 93 122
firecrawl_agent 253 2.6% 124 86
firecrawl_research_related_papers 247 2.6% 78 120
firecrawl_monitor_check 242 2.5% 89 110
firecrawl_map 240 2.5% 106 91
firecrawl_research_read_paper 236 2.5% 46 144
firecrawl_research_inspect_paper 191 2.0% 42 104
firecrawl_extract 189 2.0% 47 98
firecrawl_agent_status 186 1.9% 103 39
firecrawl_monitor_checks 172 1.8% 29 102
firecrawl_monitor_update 150 1.6% 47 61
firecrawl_research_search_github 135 1.4% 32 58
firecrawl_monitor_list 129 1.3% 22 67
firecrawl_check_crawl_status 115 1.2% 33 39
firecrawl_interact_stop 109 1.1% 24 43
firecrawl_monitor_run 109 1.1% 29 39
firecrawl_monitor_delete 104 1.1% 25 39
firecrawl_monitor_get 102 1.1% 23 39

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 2026-08-16 against claude-opus-5 via Anthropic’s count_tokens (method tools-delta/v1).

  tokens  
o200k, full capture 9,561 the badge number — every byte tools/list returned
o200k, Anthropic fields only 8,869 7.2% of the capture is MCP-only metadata
Claude, same fields 16,428 1.72× 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.

Re-derive it

npx -y mcp-context-cost verify results/firecrawl/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