mcp-context-cost

sentry — context cost

6,086 tokens across 9 tools — moderate (5–15K). Measured 2026-09-04 under methodology v1.0.

An Anthropic request carries 5,442 of those tokens as tool definitions, and Claude counts those at 9,481.

   
server (self-reported) Sentry MCP v0.39.0
status measured
tokenizer tiktoken / o200k_base
launch command npx -y @sentry/mcp-server@latest
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 SENTRY_ACCESS_TOKEN
canonical SHA-256 11ef5fbfa5440a29377fedcd23abb764cf640ba03762911c8bfcd5b11a53aebd
category vendor-official
source https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-mcp

Where the tokens are

tool tokens share description input schema output schema
update_issue 1,248 20.5% 455 710 0
search_events 1,127 18.5% 459 597 0
search_issues 853 14.0% 377 412 0
analyze_issue_with_seer 641 10.5% 331 240 0
get_sentry_resource 632 10.4% 346 218 0
search_sentry_tools 592 9.7% 247 102 177
find_projects 397 6.5% 66 211 75
find_organizations 308 5.1% 70 68 124
execute_sentry_tool 286 4.7% 138 92 0

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 6,086 the badge number — every byte tools/list returned
o200k, Anthropic fields only 5,442 10.6% of the capture is MCP-only metadata
Claude, same fields 9,481 1.56× 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 6,455 9 not recorded not recorded —
2026-08-18 6,455 9 not recorded docker no change
2026-09-03 6,086 9 not recorded docker −369
2026-09-04 6,086 9 0.39.0 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/sentry/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