Plans and pricing tiers

MCPG sells one product in four shapes. Your plan is carried inside a short-lived, Ed25519-signed license token (a JWT) that both the gateway and the control plane verify offline. That token is the single source of truth for what your tenant can do: which plugins you may install, how many gateways and workspaces you get, how long audit history is kept, and how many tool calls you may make per month.

This page lists the tiers exactly as the platform enforces them. There is no hidden "real" config — the numbers below are the quota values baked into the license issuer, so what you read here is what your deployment actually does.

At a glance

The Community tier ships free with the binary as a bundled "Tier-0" license — there is nothing to buy and nothing to phone home. Pro, Team, and Enterprise licenses are issued by the MCPG cloud federation when you subscribe.

Community (free, open-source)

The Community tier is what you get the moment you run the gateway. It is bundled with the binary as a local Tier-0 license, signed at boot, and it never contacts MCPG — it is marked air-gapped by design. No account, no card, no trial clock.

It is sized to take a solo developer well past "hello world":

• 5 gateways, 50 plugins, 1,000 requests/sec per gateway
• 1 workspace, 1 user
• Tool calls per month: unlimited. The self-hosted Community license sets this quota to 0, and a quota of 0 means no cap — the platform never meters or throttles your tool calls when you run the gateway yourself.
• 30 days of audit retention

Plugin entitlements cover the entire open-source core: identity, the Cedar and OPA policy engines, audit sinks, transport, caching, reliability, and observability plugins. (Premium namespaces like payments.* and the commercial policy plugins are reserved for paid tiers.)

One subtlety worth knowing. There are two "free" envelopes in the platform. The self-hosted Community license (what 99% of users get) grants unlimited tool calls. A separate cloud free-trial envelope — used only for hosted trial accounts that have not yet picked a paid plan — applies a metered 100,000 tool calls/month cap instead. Same plugin access and the same 5/50/1,000 resource limits; the only difference is the trial meter. If you self-host, you are uncapped.

Best for: evaluation, local development, side projects, and air-gapped single-node deployments where you never want to talk to a vendor.

Pro

The first paid tier. Pro is for a small team that has moved an MCP gateway into production and wants real headroom plus the commercial payments plugins.

• 25 gateways, 200 plugins, 5,000 requests/sec per gateway
• 10 workspaces, 25 users
• 1,000,000 tool calls/month
• 90 days of audit retention
• Plugins: open-source core plus the payments.* namespace
• Features: OIDC single sign-on and audit export
• Managed cloud gateways: Pro and above are eligible for MCPG-provisioned gateways (the free tiers are self-host only)

Best for: startups running MCP in production for a single team.

Team

Team scales the same product to an organization with multiple groups, more seats, and stricter access controls.

• 100 gateways, 500 plugins, 25,000 requests/sec per gateway
• 50 workspaces, 200 users
• 10,000,000 tool calls/month
• 180 days of audit retention
• Plugins: core + payments plus the full policy.* suite (every policy engine, not just Cedar and OPA)
• Features: OIDC and SAML SSO, audit export, and workspace-scoped RBAC

Best for: scaling companies running several teams or environments on shared infrastructure.

Enterprise

Enterprise removes the ceilings. Plugin access is the wildcard * — every namespace, including commercial policy engines, is unlocked — and quotas are set to effectively unbounded operational scale.

• 10,000 gateways, 10,000 plugins, 100,000 requests/sec per gateway
• 1,000 workspaces, 10,000 users
• Tool calls per month: unlimited (the quota is 0 = no cap, just like self-hosted Community)
• 7 years of audit retention — sized for regulated retention requirements
• Plugins: everything (*)
• Features: OIDC + SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, audit export, workspace- and environment-scoped RBAC, and BYOC (bring-your-own-cloud / customer-sovereign deployment)

Best for: regulated industries, large platform teams, and customers who need sovereign or air-gapped operation with long audit retention.

How the limits actually work

A few things worth understanding before you size a plan:

• The license is the contract. Your plan, plugin entitlements, quotas, and feature flags all travel inside one signed token. The gateway and control plane verify it offline against a published public key, so enforcement does not depend on a live connection to MCPG.
• Plugin entitlements are enforced at install/bind time. When you bind a plugin set, the control plane refuses entries outside your tier's allowed namespaces. A Community tenant simply cannot install payments.*; an Enterprise tenant can install anything.
• Tool-call quotas are a rolling 30-day window. The cap (where one applies) is counted over the trailing 30 days, not a calendar month. A quota of 0 always means unlimited — that is true for self-hosted Community and for Enterprise alike.
• Retention is tiered — what the pruner enforces today. The observability pruner reclaims data using two license quotas: status-report retention (days) and tool-invocation retention (hours) — e.g. Community keeps ~7 days of status reports and ~24 hours of invocation history. The longer audit-log windows above (audit_retention_days) are a declared license quota that the audit ledger does not yet auto-prune against; treat them as the entitled window, with enforcement on the roadmap (today you control audit retention via your log-shipping/SIEM lifecycle).

Choosing a tier

When you outgrow a tier, upgrading reissues your license with the new envelope — no redeploy required; the gateway picks up the new quotas and entitlements on its next license refresh.

To see exactly how plans, entitlements, and quotas are wired into a running deployment, see the configuration reference.