There are three problems to solve when you sell access to an MCP server: who may connect, what exactly a customer is buying, and how the money reaches your account. On SuperCognit all three are handled — servers authenticate every user with OAuth 2.1, access is sold per seat, and Stripe subscriptions, invoices and payouts run through the platform, with SuperCognit as merchant of record taking a platform fee. What is left to you is the product and the price. This post is about those, and about what the built-in parts actually do.

Why the seat is the right unit

MCP access is personal by construction. Every user who connects your server from Claude or any other MCP client authenticates through OAuth 2.1 — issuer validation and CIMD registration per the current spec — so the platform always knows which human is asking. A seat is simply that authenticated person, made billable.

Seats are also the unit buyers already understand. A company does not want to forecast query volumes for a knowledge product; it wants to know what ten people cost per month, approve it once, and stop thinking about it. Per-seat pricing is legible on both sides of the invoice, which is most of what a pricing model has to achieve.

Pricing without a spreadsheet

There is no formula, but three anchors keep you out of the weeds:

  • Price against the alternative, not the cost. If a seat saves someone one email to you per month, the seat is worth a fraction of what that email costs in your time — and your time is the expensive line item.
  • Keep tiers few. One per-seat price beats a matrix; a buyer forced to compare plans will end up comparing you to doing nothing.
  • The test is not whether the price is right. It is whether the buyer can approve it without calling a meeting.

What the subscription is buying

A fair question from buyers: why is this recurring? Because the product is not a file, it is a maintained answer surface. The knowledge base re-syncs on a schedule — as often as hourly — so it tracks your source material; answers stay cited so the buyer's team can verify them; and the server keeps up with the MCP spec, whose auth has already changed once and will change again. A PDF is a one-time sale because it starts rotting on delivery. This does not.

From published server to first payout

01

Publish the product

Import your site — crawled into a cited knowledge base in about two minutes — upload your documents, attach any tools. The same build gives you a chat agent, which is the demo you will send prospects before they commit to a seat.

02

Set the per-seat price

Attach a per-seat subscription to the server. Checkout, recurring billing and invoices are handled by the platform; you write no billing code and operate no payment stack.

03

Put it on your domain

Custom domains are supported. Buyers should connect to your hostname — it is your product, and the address should say so.

04

The buyer subscribes and seats their team

Each person connects from Claude or any MCP client and signs in through OAuth 2.1. Access follows the seat — not a shared key that outlives the employee who pasted it into a config file.

05

The payout arrives

SuperCognit is the merchant of record: the subscription, the invoice and the payment run through the platform, the platform fee comes off, and the remainder is paid out to you.

What merchant of record means in practice

The merchant of record is the party actually making the sale — the name on the transaction, the issuer of the invoice. Here that is SuperCognit, which is precisely the point: for a consultant or a small firm, the alternative to a merchant-of-record arrangement is becoming a part-time billing department. The platform fee is what that department costs. Your accounting sees payouts, not payment operations.

Keep the paid boundary honest

The server answers only from its own workspace — isolation is structural — so keep the paid knowledge base deliberate. You can run a private internal server and a paid public one side by side without either seeing the other; what you should not do is let the paid product accumulate content nobody decided to sell. Buyers are paying for a curated surface. Curate it.

None of this requires the product to be finished. It requires the product to be honest about what it knows. Publish, price a seat, sell it to someone who already trusts you, and let the invoice history tell you when to raise the price.