mcp-context-cost

puppeteer — context cost

540 tokens across 7 tools — lean (< 1K). Measured 2026-09-04 under methodology v1.0.

An Anthropic request carries 540 of those tokens as tool definitions, and Claude counts those at 1,267.

   
server (self-reported) example-servers/puppeteer v0.1.0
status measured
tokenizer tiktoken / o200k_base
launch command npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-puppeteer
isolation docker · public.ecr.aws/docker/library/node:22-slim · network bridge · architecture not on record · network enabled for package fetch; clean FS, no host credent
env vars supplied none
canonical SHA-256 d9e46f0316917c1d140ffeebceefd4d31c16188780ac278baf347ff536015dd0
category official-reference
source https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers-archived

Where the tokens are

tool tokens share description input schema
puppeteer_screenshot 142 26.3% 11 117
puppeteer_navigate 129 23.9% 4 111
puppeteer_select 65 12.0% 9 43
puppeteer_fill 60 11.1% 5 42
puppeteer_evaluate 48 8.9% 7 27
puppeteer_click 47 8.7% 6 28
puppeteer_hover 47 8.7% 6 28

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 540 the badge number — every byte tools/list returned
o200k, Anthropic fields only 540 0.0% of the capture is MCP-only metadata
Claude, same fields 1,267 2.35× 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
2026-08-16 540 7 not recorded not recorded —
2026-08-19 540 7 not recorded docker no change
2026-09-02 540 7 not recorded docker no change
2026-09-04 540 7 0.1.0 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/puppeteer/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