State of Remote MCP Servers, October 2026

This report is built from one complete pass over the official MCP Registry. Every endpoint we tested got exactly two requests without credentials, initialize and tools/list; no tool was called. The browsable result is the list of free remote MCP servers, the raw data is on GitHub and re-tested every week.

1. What is in the registry

• 28,933 remote endpoints from 28,282 server names (latest versions only).
• 96 % Streamable HTTP (27,840), 4 % the older SSE transport (1,093).
• 4,945 endpoints (17 %) declare required headers, usually an API key; we did not test those.
• 54 % of endpoints are published under a domain namespace (like com.example/server), 46 % under a GitHub namespace (io.github.user/server).

2. Do they work?

We tested the Streamable HTTP endpoints without required headers, skipped temporary tunnels and capped each host at five URLs, so gateways with thousands of paths count only five times. That left 17,070 endpoints.

Of the servers that asked for sign-in, 5,048 answered HTTP 401, 53 answered 403 and 62 answered 402 Payment Required: servers that want payment per call, the status code that pay-per-request protocols such as x402 build on.

Why the 2,284 broken ones failed

A 404 usually means the published URL is wrong (a missing /mcp path or a changed route). HTTP 530 is Cloudflare's «origin unreachable»: the domain still exists, the server behind it does not.

3. Where they run

Most servers run on their own domain. Cloudflare Workers is by far the largest platform with 11 % of all endpoints. 116 endpoints point to temporary Cloudflare tunnels (trycloudflare.com), which stop working when the publisher's laptop goes offline; we skipped them in testing.

4. How big they are

The median open server offers 6 tools; 68 % have fewer than 10. 292 servers expose 50 or more, the largest 627. Big tool lists cost context in every conversation, which is why some clients let you switch individual tools off.

5. Templates and copies

The most common tool names show how many servers are generated from the same template: submit_enquiry appears on 394 servers, enquiry_describe and enquiry_fields on 389, and a set of seven dataset_* tools on 197. One description appears word for word on 42 servers. The most common genuinely generic tool names are search (478 servers) and fetch (323). After removing servers whose tool set appears more than three times or whose description appears more than twice, and keeping at most two per domain, 7,690 of the 9,620 open servers remain.

6. How well tools are described

In a second pass we read the full tool definitions of 295 hand-picked open servers (2,778 tools): 78 % of parameters carry a description, but only 14 % of tools say when to use them. Details and a checklist: MCP tool description best practices.

Method and data

Registry read on 16 October 2026 (latest version of every server). Requests: initialize with protocol version 2025-06-18, the initialized notification, then tools/list, 10-second timeout, at most five URLs per host. «Open» means a tool list came back without credentials. Data and scripts: github.com/diegobruegger-prog/free-remote-mcp-servers, CC BY 4.0 for the data. Check a single server with the MCP Server Tester, or see the live status of well-known MCP servers.