Why we indexed 11,000 MCP servers — and what we learned
The MCP ecosystem grew from 200 servers to 11,000 in 18 months. We crawled npm, the official registry, PulseMCP, and Smithery — here is what surprised us.
The numbers
When Anthropic shipped MCP in late 2024, there were maybe 30 servers. Today our catalog has 11,750+ verified MCP servers. We pull from four sources daily: the official MCP registry, PulseMCP, Smithery, and a direct npm crawl.
Five things that surprised us
1. The long tail is enormous. Top 50 servers (gmail, github, notion, slack, postgres) account for ~80% of installs. The remaining 51,000 servers each get fewer than 10 installs/month. This is fine — niche servers (e.g. an MCP for your specific industrial sensor) only need to exist for the right user.
2. Half of MCPs are auto-generated wrappers. Someone wraps an OpenAPI spec, calls it "MCP for X", and ships. Quality varies wildly. We surface this with the Verified badge — manually reviewed, install-tested servers.
3. JSON config is the #1 frustration. Every search query that ends up on Unyly correlates with "claude_desktop_config.json" complaints elsewhere. The single biggest leverage point in MCP UX is removing the JSON edit step.
4. Multi-client install is a default expectation. Users have Claude Desktop AND Cursor AND Cline. Single-client install (just write claude_desktop_config.json) feels broken.
5. Hosted servers are the next frontier. OAuth flows, persistent state, and team sharing don't fit the local-process model. InstaPay billing is what unlocks this.
What's next
We're prioritizing security review (Verified badge), use-case stacks (sales, dev, research bundles), and hosted runners. Submit your MCP at unyly.org/submit.