What Does an MCP Gateway Cost in 2026?

Short answer: MCP gateway pricing in 2026 runs from genuinely free (a crowd of open source projects) through usage-based plans starting around $29 a month, up to enterprise platforms at $499 to $2,999 a month, with a large governance camp publishing no prices at all. We checked every vendor page cited here in late July 2026, and where a vendor hides pricing, we say so instead of guessing.

Full disclosure before the numbers: Tulimoa is our gateway, it appears at the end, and we have an obvious interest in pricing transparency because we practice it. Judge the table on its sources.

The four pricing models

Per tool call. You pay for what the agent actually does. Composio's plans meter tool calls; ours meter "credits" where one credit is one routed tool call. Predictable per unit, scales with real usage.

Per task or bundled quota. Zapier MCP is included in Zapier plans, with each tool call consuming 2 tasks from the plan quota. You are effectively buying tasks, and MCP rides along.

Per seat or per gateway. Enterprise platforms price by users, gateways, or models: TrueFoundry publishes tiers, Kong prices per gateway and per model, Lunar licenses per seat without public amounts.

Free, self-hosted. The open source field (IBM ContextForge, Docker MCP Gateway, MetaMCP, Unla, MCPJungle and more) costs license-nothing and ops-something. We surveyed it separately in [open source MCP gateways](/blog/open-source-mcp-gateways).

The verified numbers, as of July 2026

Two footnotes that matter. Composio's site carries a banner that pricing changes on August 15, 2026, so treat those numbers as expiring. And a derived comparison worth seeing, with assumptions stated: at entry tiers, one Zapier MCP tool call costs roughly $0.053 (Pro plan arithmetic, 2 tasks per call), while a Composio call on the $29 tier lands around $0.00015. That is a spread of more than 300x per call between two working products, which is why "what does a call cost me" is the first question to ask any vendor.

The vendors with no public price

Here is the part no vendor listicle prints: as of our July 2026 checks, the entire enterprise governance camp is quote-only. Traefik Hub (contact buttons only), MintMCP (consultation page), Lunar MCPX (tiers by seat count, no amounts), Obot Enterprise (pricing page returned a 404), LiteLLM Enterprise (trial then sales), Lasso's commercial platform, Stacklok's ToolHive Enterprise: no published numbers anywhere.

Quote-only is not a scandal; enterprise deals vary. But it has a practical consequence: you cannot budget without a sales cycle, and you cannot compare without three of them. If your procurement process is one person with a company card, that camp is effectively priced out of reach regardless of the eventual number.

How to compare offers that meter differently

• Normalize to your workload. Estimate your monthly tool calls (an active agent doing real work can run thousands per week), then compute each offer's cost at that volume. A generous free tier matters at 5,000 calls and is irrelevant at 2 million.
• Ask what counts as a call. Do failed calls bill? (On our gateway they are refunded.) Do memory or utility calls bill? Metering the calls you want the agent to make freely is a quiet tax on good behavior.
• Price the ops, not just the license. Free self-hosted plus a day of platform-engineer time per month has a real cost; put a number on it before comparing against hosted.
• Check what is bundled. Audit trails, credential vault, revocation: [the security features](/blog/mcp-gateway-security) are the point of a gateway, and some vendors gate them behind the enterprise tier.

Where Tulimoa lands, stated plainly

[Our pricing](/pricing) is public: a free plan with 25,000 credits a month (forever, one credit = one routed tool call, failed calls refunded), Pro at $29 for 250,000, Scale at $99 for 3 million, annual billing giving two months free. Memory tools never cost credits on any plan, because charging for remember and recall would punish exactly the behavior that saves you tokens. Honesty items: the gateway is early beta, not self-serve yet, and each plan currently connects one agent.

We put the numbers on a public page for the same reason this article exists: an infrastructure market where most vendors hide prices is a market where buyers deserve one dated, sourced table. For choosing beyond price, our [12-question gateway checklist](/blog/how-to-choose-an-mcp-gateway) covers the rest.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an MCP gateway cost for a small team?

As of July 2026: $0 on free tiers (Composio 20k calls, Tulimoa 25k credits, or any open source option self-hosted), and roughly $29 a month at the first paid tier of the call-metered products. Enterprise governance platforms start around $499 where prices are public at all.

Why do so many MCP gateway vendors hide pricing?

The governance camp sells to enterprises through sales teams, where quotes flex per deal. It is normal practice with a real side effect: small teams cannot budget or compare, which is why the transparent per-call products dominate the low end.

What is the cheapest MCP gateway?

Self-hosted open source, if your time is free, which it is not. Among hosted products with public prices, entry costs cluster at $0 to $29 a month; compare per-call cost at your actual volume rather than the sticker, because metering differences (calls vs tasks) move the real price by orders of magnitude.