I Made MCP 94% Cheaper (And It Only Took One Command)
Every AI agent using MCP is quietly overpaying. Not on the API calls themselves - those are fine. The tax is on the instruction manual.
Before your agent can do anything useful, it needs to know what tools are available. MCP’s answer is to dump the entire tool catalog into the conversation as JSON Schema. Every tool, every parameter, every option.
CLI does the same job but cheaper.
I took an MCP server and generated a CLI from it using CLIHub. Same tools, same OAuth, same API underneath. Two things change: what loads at session start, and how the agent calls a tool.
The numbers below assume a typical setup: 6 MCP servers, 14 tools each, 84 tools total.
1. Session start
MCP dumps every tool schema into the conversation upfront. CLI uses a lightweight skill listing - just names and locations. The agent discovers details when it needs them.1
MCP loads this (~185 tokens * 84 = 15540): { "name": "notion-search", "description": "Search for pages and databases", "inputSchema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "query": { "type": "string", "description": "The search query text" }, "filter": { "type": "object", "properties": { "property": { "type": "string", "enum": ["object"] }, "value": { "type": "string", "enum": ["page", "database"] } } } } }, { "name": "notion-fetch", ... } ... (84 tools total) } CLI loads this (~50 tokens * 6 = 300):
2. Tool call
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