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MCP Tool Schemas Cost 91K Tokens Before You Ask a Single Question

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A developer analyzed token consumption when connecting Claude Code to five MCP servers — filesystem, GitHub, Postgres, Puppeteer, and a custom search tool — and found that tool schema discovery alone consumes 91,247 tokens upfront. With per-conversation overhead and tool result wrapping, a single session can burn through roughly 120,000 tokens before any meaningful output is generated. At Claude 3.5 Sonnet pricing, this translates to costs of $156–$300 per month for a developer running 20 daily conversations. To address this, the author built an open-source CLI tool called mcptoon, which caches schemas and uses a compressed Token-Optimized Object Notation format to cut total conversation token usage by around 71 percent.

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