Launch HN: Manufact (YC S25) – MCP Cloud
manufact.comHi HN, we are Pietro and Luigi, cofounders of Manufact (https://manufact.com), a cloud for MCP apps and servers. We used to be called mcp-use, and still build open source SDKs for MCP under that name: https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use. We did a Show HN about that last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44747229.
Today we want to tell you about our cloud product, Manufact, which is to mcp-use as Vercel is to Next.js. Manufact is an MCP vertical cloud designed for dev teams putting MCP Apps and servers in production.You can ship, iterate on, test and monitor your MCPs, and get them ready for the store submissions. All with the best developer and agent experience in mind.
Here is a demo video of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2rbr5OT9LI.
We have been working on MCP since April 2025. Our first focus was making it easy to build agents that could use any MCP server, and a lot of people started using our SDKs. Then the harness revolution kicked off: Claude Code, Claude Cowork, ChatGPT, Codex, OpenCode started shipping agent harnesses that made most standalone agent frameworks redundant. That pushed us to the other side of the connection, the servers. If agents were going to consolidate into a few harnesses, then first-class integration with the rest of a company's systems (i.e. MCP) would become the thing that mattered, so we started building up our server SDKs.
Then in succession:
1. Oct 2025. ChatGPT Apps SDK. OpenAI brings app UIs to ChatGPT, built on top of MCP and the work of mcp-ui. 2. Late 2025. The stores open. ChatGPT starts accepting app submissions, Claude grows its connector directory with selected partners. 3. Jan 2026. MCP Apps becomes official. SEP-1865 merges as the first MCP extension (io.modelcontextprotocol/ui): one UI standard any host can render.
Today, all the major clients fully support MCP and are opening marketplaces of reviewed MCPs that can be one click installed. All major tech companies have an MCP server, and many of those are reporting that already 15+% of their usage comes from their MCP, and we start to have a good way to distribute them just now.
MCP can return fully interactive UIs. So companies can (1) display data in more meaningful ways to their users (e.g. analytics, ecommerce) and (2) display their branding in some of the most used products on the planet (ChatGPT, Claude etc). Numbers: an engineer at Amplitude reported that their MCP saw a 2x increase in retention after adding UI to their MCP.
Clients (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) are starting to dynamically present MCP servers/apps to users, based on their intent. Products will be organically discovered on the chats!
We feel that MCP is reaching its maturity moment. Now that MCPs are starting to be easy to install and discover, there is going to be a huge incentive for users to use them and for companies to create them:
1 - Most work is already done from AI chats, this is not going to stop, MCP gives you a way to interact with products without manually using their dashboards.
2 - MCP allows you to bring the context together in one place: you can read an email, create a ticket while plugged into the source code of your product, or your knowledge base. Aggregation of products that was not possible before, will happen in the chat, orchestrated by increasingly intelligent models.
If AI apps (Codex, Claude Desktop) are the new browsers, as PG said in a recent tweet https://x.com/paulg/status/2069080429236191504, then MCPs are the new websites.
But there is a catch:
- Submission process on the stores is still quite tricky, manual and takes up valuable time. - Hardly anybody knows how to design a good MCP: most of them are 1:1 proxies of the API and are abandoned, since being one shotted a few months ago. - The MCP Spec advances quickly and it is not easy to keep track of the changes, and what they mean for your server. - Auth is still a mystery for most teams (API key in the URL ???). - Most companies are not even aware that MCPs can return interactive UIs. - Clients still have to consolidate behavior, some do dynamic tool discovery, some don't, some persist authentication properly some don't.
We built Manufact and mcp-use to solve these problems. Our SDKs help them build good MCPs, our inspector helps them test locally, and our cloud helps them ship/publish and monitor them in production.
To deploy on Manufact you just need to connect a Github app, pick the repo, we'll detect the framework you are working with and get you a live MCP url as soon as possible.
In our platform, that live URL will be used to give you a chat where you can try/debug your MCP immediately and share it with your team. If you push an update on a new experimental branch, you'll be able to test that as well thanks to preview deployments.
Once your server is ready to go live, we help you make sure that it does not break. You can configure automated tests that will take your MCP server, install it in ChatGPT and Claude and test it. We do not test the model, we test the client (model + harness). This way you reliably know if your server breaks where people use it.
Since publishing on the store is a major distribution unlock for companies (your MCP can be dynamically discovered and one click installed across Claude products, and ChatGPT), we collected a set of requirements that will keep your submission from being rejected. You check this locally before going through the actual review process.
Once your server is live, you'll want to understand how it is used. Our analytics are designed for MCP, so you'll know how many users are hitting your MCP, how many tool calls you receive, from which client.
You can try out https://manufact.com for free today. We have usage-based pricing and on our free account we give free credits for you to try it out. If you have an MCP already, just connect your Github repo and deploy, if not you can build one using our skill and SDKs pretty simply (we will guide you in the onboarding).
We would love to hear feedback about the product in the comments, and hear thoughts from everyone about MCP. Thanks! :)
Having to sign up to browse available MCPs stopped me dead in my tracks and made me close the tab. I won't be the only one. Perhaps consider allowing people to browse more of the site before you try to force a signup on them?
hey thanks for the feedback, we do not really offer a "set" of pre made MCPs that we could show pre signup, unfortunately our platform requires you to deploy something to use it - we try to give an overview of all the features in our "Platform" section in the navbar on top
I am really impressed with your demo video, particularly the analytics, logs, and test suite features.
I'm a target customer where I have a few curious customers, but I'm not fully ready to roll it out yet across the customer base. One thing that's stopping me, what does credits mean on your pricing page? And what is the pay as you go price after you hit your limit? I would need to be able to budget this before I deploy.
The second piece - we already have a CLI, which is great for terminal based agents and what we will continue to recommend. What we really want, and I think is what you are offering, is basically an easier way to deploy a 'remote connector' to use Claude lingo so that normal users with the claude/chatgpt app can just use our MCP. Can you point me to guidelines or the right place in your open source templates to understand how I would best handle auth (or the tradeoffs in each) during the initial build phase of the MCP server?
thank you so much we have put a lot of love into our product!
pricing: we offer several credit based products that have different cost - requests, build minutes, eval runs, checklist all have different unit cost the breakdown is here https://docs.manufact.com/dashboard/billing thanks for pointing out that it should be more transparent!
auth: we published a few blogs https://manufact.com/blog/oauth-mcp https://manufact.com/blog/authentication
+ lots of auth templates you can start from https://manufact.com/templates
This is cool. I was skeptical of MCP's until I made one recently. They're essentially the exact same as 1) giving your agent a CLI tool or REST API and 2) pointing it there in an AGENT.md/CLAUDE.md. Agents are great at using built-for-human CLI tools and IMO they don't need anything purpose-built for agents. The key difference, which ends up being a usability win for non-technical users, is that the MCP bundles 1 and 2 - harnesses inject the MCP tool descriptions on every session after install. Of course, that's also why you need to be careful about context bloat when using/building them
+1 !! Thanks for putting it so clearly, also CLIs and REST have their space in some applications, I think MCP is a way to organize them and distribute them better
Yeah MCPs are easier to distribute.
In my experience, they also work better with dumber models than CLIs (which saves money)
I don’t like that non-technical users has to keep context bloat in mind. That should be ”solved” on the developer end. How would they now it’s bloated if they treat MCPs like regular software? I 100% agree on designing things for humans, and you’ll get the AI-agents for free. I am surprised no one seems to have figured that out yet.
Isn't it solved with Tool Search? I have not heard people complaining about MCP context bloat for like a quarter already.
TBF, I haven’t heard much about MCPs at all lately. I thought it was one of those “install once -> make LinkedIn post on how MCPs will change the world -> ugh MCP crashes with wierd error -> abandon” things. Could be wrong.
Cool. The main thing I like about MCP is the authentication story, particularly the standardisation around OAuth.
Because of that, I think it is often worth wrapping an API in an MCP server. I actually had to do this recently.
I have been working on an open-source project called crmkit.ai. I was not planning to add MCP support because the project already works in a very agent-native way, where the agent reads the `setup.md` file at the root of the server and then uses `curl`.
That works well for normal agents. It kind of works in claude.ai, although you need to allowlist the domain. It does not work on chatgpt.com because the sandbox does not allow arbitrary outbound web requests. It should work fine in Codex, Claude Code, etc. because those run locally.
For ChatGPT, I was forced to write an MCP server. But because this is supposed to be an agent-first CRM, I thought that instead of exposing hundreds of small tools and polluting the context, why not expose a single tool called `request`, where the LLM writes the actual HTTP request?
That should work, right?
It does not. ChatGPT effectively forces you to unwrap the entire API into lots of small tools, because each one may need to be authorised separately.
Anyway, I ended up doing it, but needless to say, the design feels wrong. It would have been much better if the MCP server could expose a single `request` tool and keep the context tight.
The single-tool concept does work. We use crmkit internally with fully autonomous agents, and I even use it personally as a productivity tool.
The moral of the story is that MCP has great authentication but I rather not use it if I can. If I need to use it I would prefer to expose a single tool that write the raw request even-though it feels like a hack and it does not work across all chat systems.
I hope this anecdote helps.
This is great. I hadn't heard of MCP Apps — pulling an interface into the LLM could be really useful. I'll trying it.
Been finding some tasks are better inside Claude or ChatGPT chat window, like brainstorming names. I ended up building an MCP for domain lookups (https://namebrewery.com). It lets me go back and forth, branch on different preferences, and steer the LLM toward a name I like, and still available as a dot com.
The examples in your repo have given me some other ideas to try out.
The marketplace/distribution angle is interesting to me, is ChatGPT really surfacing & reccomending random MCP apps to users based on their conversations, or this still aspirational/early days? How is discoverability in these marketplaces, are users actually browsing/searching for MCP apps and using them?
Thanks for the comment I wrote this piece that goes a bit into this https://manufact.com/blog/what-is-an-mcp-app
TLDR Claude does it today, Chat will probably start soon.
The Vercel-for-MCP framing is useful; the hard part seems like permissions and audit trails once tools cross org boundaries. Are policies enforced per server/app, or at each tool call?
this is something you would handle at the code level as you build your MCP - or better we do not offer those yet at platform level as it always seems that is something developers would put in the code - which shape would you imagine ?
Question: I have an MCP server that is working well with Auth (Google Only), running on vercel. What benefit would I get from running it on manufact?
On monetizing my MCP... How do the different MCP "Stores" handle this? Do some take a cut? Or are they agnostic? Does manufact help with monetization?
Thanks for the comment! Vercel is a generic cloud provider, so you won’t get any of the MCP specific features (listed in the post) and development experience - monetization is still not regulated by the protocol, so people would pay for your product before using your MCP, then you can charge based on subscription or usage as usual!
Do you use MCP-handler for your MCP ?
Thanks for sharing all this. Where is the submission page on claude / openAI to submit MCP servers to their directories?
on claude you'll need an enterprise and team account here is their post about it https://claude.com/blog/observability-for-developers-buildin... on chat you can find it in the openai platform https://platform.openai.com/apps-manage - need a paid account too
Hey Luigi & Pietro, it's Matt from MCPJam (previously). So cool seeing you guys rock the space. Congrats on the launch!
Any apps you can share that are on the OpenAI apps store / Claude store that are built / hosted on Manufact?
This is a great question. I would also love to know what apps I check out on the store!
Thanks for asking we have several! here is our own, it is both on the ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/apps/manufact/asdk_app_69cbfd610c3881919... and Claude Connector store https://claude.ai/directory/connectors/manufact
Are there any apps that weren't built by you, but you know that use your SDK that are live?
MCP is something people think of as a "panacea" to all AI issues. I think people are beginning to realize it is just one, albeit important, part of a successful AI architecture.
First of all, people have been saying this for a long time. It’s nothing new, at least half a year, maybe closer to a year.
Secondly, it’s not even that important, it’s the tool calling itself that’s important. MCP servers are just a convenient way to interact with remote services when a command line utility for the same would be inconvenient.
You may want to have a look at Skybridge, a TypeScript framework designed to build MCP servers and MCP Apps, with a recent emphasis on making authentication easy.
TypeScript, for all its benefits, still feels like a toy or project language. I'd love to see a Rust, C++, or even a Go library for such purpose.
I'd love for people with experience to break me of this negativity towards TypeScript. Anybody?
a few thoughts for MCP: - typescript "runs" in the browser, which is very handy to develop browser side MCP Clients - for similar reasons it is the only real option to develop UIs for MCP Apps for instance
not particularly related to MCP: as most products rely on external APIs provided by the labs (ChatGPT wrapper as we used to call them) frontend languages become more important
Really excited to use this, i'm migrating off stainless after anthropic bought them, we have to be off by september
happy to onboard you personally! We did a stainless migration two days ago :)
Love it guys! Also working deep in the MCP space we’ve used manufact right since the start. Great product, team and new release! Congrats
we have so many problems with MCP related to auth, scopes etc... how do you guys help solve that?
Can you get into the specifics of the problems you currently experience with MCP? I'd love to learn more.
with our SDK we provide many adapters to popular authentication providers which basically provision oauth on your server in one line of code, here the docs https://docs.mcp-use.com/typescript/server/authentication/in...
also we ship templates for you to get started https://manufact.com/templates
One issue i saw related to scopes is the offline_access one that causes frequent reauthenticate request from the client. for example codex has this bug (https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/20503). many servers solve this with some workarounds or increasing the token life. In v2 of mcp-use coming end of the month there should be a builtin way to deal with buggy clients so the server remains connected.
Huge congrats to the team on the official launch of Manufact!
Looks great! Congratulations on the launch, guys!
thanks!
Very interesting, will keep you in mind.
Looks great, congrats Pietro & Luigi!
thanks!
stopped using mcp and mostly using skills now. can't understand what this product does or how it could help me.
To me that’s a bit like saying I started using shell scripts and stopped calling APIs - skills are playbooks, mcps are ‘documented APIs’ for the ai to call.
Yes I can’t figure out exactly what it does…
Ciao Luigi! GJ team manufact!
congrats guys! how does the automated testing using ChatGPT/Claude clients work?
MCP is a protocol, that's all.
Saying MCPs are the new websites is like saying "SOAP" is the new websites, or "REST" is the new websites.
MCP is basically the AI equivalent of a REST API, it's not a product anymore than JSON is a product or XML is a product.
MCP is a deadend. CLI use is the future.
Could you elaborate on this thought? MCP vs CLI feels very much like a Apples/Oranges comparison, without additional context.
MCP makes a lot, lot more sense when you think of it as as a auth standard and not a comparison with CLIs. It obviously does more than just auth, but having standardised auth (which CLIs definitely do not) is the real 'killer' feature.
Yep, that was exactly my point with the ask to elaborate.
MCPs and CLIs feel like two wholly different things. Contrasting them feels even more confusing than comparing Skills vs MCPs, which would also be wrong in my personal view. Different runtime requirements, different access patterns, different distribution, different discoverability.
I agree with @martinanld that MCPs, especially with the advent of EMA, are a completely different beast thanks to a structured way for auth and access control.
Not for every situation. CLI is great for coding agents (and I'd agree, far better in most cases than MCP). But it requires some execution runtime somewhere to actually run. So for app use cases where you don't want to build out your own tools for every integration, MCP can be a solid option.
Also, in my opinion, it's much easier to build a good MCP interface than it is to build a good CLI interface - and afaik there's support for MCP tools to return things like images from an MCP tool call directly to the calling LLM that is a bit tricker to do via CLI.
cached thought. running CLIs is impractical and expensive in many environments and a hell of a lot less secure than using MCP
They serve two different purposes.
Edited*
> Tell me you don't understand what you're saying without telling me you don't understand what you're saying.
Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Your comment would be fine without that last swipe, and even better if you had gone on to say what the two purposes are. Then we could learn something from it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Apologies, I appreciate you posting this!
Thanks for the kind reply! I'll collapse this subthread since the GP comment is fine now.
MCP is great for docs and stuff, also saves tokens and reduces errors if you have something complicated you're abstracting over
- agents have old/inaccurate knowledge and it's nice to have up to date docs: https://awslabs.github.io/mcp/servers/aws-documentation-mcp-...
- geting agents to do apple builds and stuff is much easier with: https://github.com/getsentry/XcodeBuildMCP
- also for searching stuff like pdfs/epubs it's nice to have a place that's easy/fast for an agent to go to: https://github.com/nburns/doc-search-mcp
none of these strictly requrie mcp, but it is still a useful abstraction/shared convention
MCP makes token use WORSE, not better.
Not if you use mcplexer.com ;)
I am so tired of people repeating this. Usually, this results from conflating two uses of MCP: local, which can indeed be replaced by CLI (and you can argue which one is better), and remote, which is entirely different, and there is no way to replace it with a CLI (note that you are making an implicit assumption that a CLI tool can be used at all, which is not always the case).
Please don't repeat this. It's like saying that apples are dead and oranges are the future.
CLI certainly is better than local MCP. But nowadays, most MCPs are remote and the comparison fall short, at the notable exception of `gh` in a coding environment. But having CLI already authenticated is not guaranted either!
There is definitely some debate going on on mcp/cli/api etc, but is quite obvious that mcp is being adopted as standard for integrating third party applications to the major clients => chatgpt apps, claude connectors, mistral, cursor etc.. they all connect to external apps using mcp. Of course it's possible for you to tell claude to use some cli directly but it's much easier to connect the mcp with one click
I've been sitting in the same camp recently. We maintain both an internal MCP and CLI for our app which our devs use locally. The CLI so far feels like a much smoother experience both in terms of setup, control and performance.
But i can see how MCP being able to plug into a remote agent that doesn't have terminal access is very useful. Seems like it's a best tool for the job conversation or am I missing some other advantage?
we've been using manufact for months now. couldn't build mcps another way.
On your website under "Thousands of dev-teams are building with mcp-use" you include a quote from your CTO (@enri). If thousands of teams are using the product, I would think you could omit this post.
I think you have a really neat product here, but these types of testimonials do you more harm than good; they sour my opinion of all other testimonials on your site. I shouldn't have to play detective.
noted! thanks for the feedback, will be gone soon edit: gone