Tunnels & reverse federation

The managed relay on mcpg.cloud lets a gateway serve MCP without binding a public port. The gateway dials out to the relay; the relay answers inbound MCP requests back down that connection. You get a public MCP URL for a gateway that listens on nothing — or, privately, a way to federate a gateway running in your own infrastructure so its secrets never leave your boundary.

This page covers the hosted relay, the plans, and how tunnels are billed. For the mechanics — flags, config, the tunnel:// federation upstream, the security model — see the reverse tunnels guide.

What the managed relay gives you

• A public MCP endpoint with nothing to operate. mcpg --tunnel and your gateway is reachable at https://<name>.tunnels.mcpg.cloud/mcp — no ingress, no DNS, no TLS to manage. Governance still runs on every request.
• Reverse federation without moving secrets. Run the gateway that holds your credentials inside your own network, open a private tunnel, and let an MCPG-Cloud gateway federate it. The cloud aggregates and governs the tools; the secrets stay with you. This is the reason most teams upgrade.
• Managed quota, metering, and billing. The relay authorizes every dial-in against your plan — org, subscription status, allowed modes, and concurrent quota — and meters relayed bytes for fair-use overage.

Plans

Your plan sets how many tunnels run concurrently and which modes you may use. The concurrent relay slot is the value metric; bytes are only a fair-use guardrail.

• Community is the free wedge: one public tunnel, no card — enough to expose a dev gateway to ChatGPT or an agent.
• Private tunnels (reverse federation) begin at Team. That's the secret-sovereign federation pattern; it's included in Team rather than gated to Enterprise.
• e2ee mode is Enterprise. (See the e2ee status note in the tunnels guide — it is gated but not yet cryptographically enforced in the data plane; self-host the relay if you need the relay blind today.)

How tunnels are billed

• Quota, not per-tunnel fees. Your plan includes its concurrent-tunnel allotment. Opening one past the cap is refused with an upgrade prompt — existing tunnels are never killed.
• Bytes are fair-use overage. The relay meters bytes it relays for each org and exports them to your subscription as a metered overage line. MCP traffic is small (kilobytes per call), so this rarely bites; it exists to price abuse, not ordinary use.
• No dev bill-shock. The free tier throttles rather than bills; paid plans alert before overage.

Billing rolls into the same subscription as the rest of your usage — see editions and billing for the account model.

Open a tunnel against the cloud

Get an org token from mcpg.cloud → Settings → Tunnels, then:

export MCPG_TUNNEL_TOKEN=<your org token>

# Public dev tunnel → https://<name>.tunnels.mcpg.cloud/mcp
mcpg --config gw.yaml --tunnel --tunnel-name demo

# Private tunnel for reverse federation (Team+) — no public URL
mcpg --config gw.yaml --tunnel --private --tunnel-name acme-crm

The reverse tunnels guide walks through the full pairing — the customer-side private tunnel and the cloud-side tunnel:// federation upstream that re-exports its tools.

Where to go next

• Reverse tunnels guide — flags, config, security model, troubleshooting.
• MCP federation — the consuming side of a tunnel:// upstream.
• Publish a config — run a managed gateway on the cloud.

To discuss Team or Enterprise, email agent@mcpg.dev or use mcpg.cloud.