Every MCP server you add spends part of your agent's context before the conversation starts, because each registered tool's JSON schema is sent to the model on every session. That cost is invisible until an agent starts truncating, and it is the thing most MCP comparisons leave out. We ranked five servers that give Claude Code, Cursor and other MCP clients live web data, on four things a developer actually feels: how many platforms they cover, what their tool definitions cost in context, how long the install takes, and what a call really costs.
Scavio ships 191 tools across 31 platforms plus Extract behind one API key, and is the only server on this list that lets you choose how much of that surface loads. Registering everything costs 262KB of tools/list, roughly 70k tokens; the default is 106 tools at 102KB, and SCAVIO_PLATFORMS=google,extract trims it to about 20KB. Hosted at mcp.scavio.dev with no install, or npx locally. Most endpoints cost 1 credit, and $30 buys 7,000 of them.
Full Ranking
Scavio
Agents that need many platforms behind one key, without paying for all of them in context
- 191 tools across 31 platforms plus Extract, one API key
- Tool payload is configurable: 262KB for everything, 102KB by default, ~20KB for a focused agent
- Hosted at mcp.scavio.dev, or npx locally, no OAuth either way
- Structured JSON per platform rather than page markdown
- 402 on exhausted credits carries a billing URL, so failures are explicit
- No general crawler: Extract handles a URL at a time, it does not spider a site
- Smaller proxy estate than the enterprise providers, since it buys upstream rather than owning it
- Fewer long-tail sites than a marketplace of thousands of community scrapers
- Newer brand with a smaller community than Firecrawl or Apify
Firecrawl
Turning arbitrary pages and whole sites into LLM-ready markdown
- Official MCP server, one command: npx -y firecrawl-mcp
- Clean markdown output aimed squarely at RAG pipelines
- Crawls whole sites, not just single URLs
- The most frequently recommended option in 2026 round-ups
- General-purpose crawling, so no structured per-platform schemas
- Amazon or Instagram data comes back as page content to parse yourself
- No control over how much of the tool surface loads
ScraperAPI
Hard anti-bot targets where the proxy layer matters most
- Hosted MCP endpoint, config is one snippet with an Authorization header
- 40M+ proxies with CAPTCHA handling and JS rendering
- Structured JSON for Google, Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Redfin
- High success rates on protected sites
- Only five structured verticals; everything else is raw HTML
- No social platform coverage
- Entry price is higher than credit-based alternatives
Apify
Long-tail sites where someone has already written the scraper
- MCP server fronting a marketplace of thousands of community actors
- Widest long-tail site coverage of anything on this list
- Actors exist for niche platforms nobody else supports
- Actor quality and maintenance vary by author
- Output shape differs per actor, so an agent cannot assume a schema
- Usage-based pricing on top of a plan makes per-call cost hard to predict
- Deprecated actors are common in search results
Bright Data
Enterprise volume with procurement and compliance requirements
- 150M+ residential IPs, the largest proxy estate available
- Strong compliance and legal posture for regulated buyers
- Very high measured success rates in third-party benchmarks
- Priced and contracted for enterprises, not individual developers
- Heavier setup than a one-line MCP install
- Overkill for an agent that needs a few hundred calls a day
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Criteria | Scavio | Runner-up | 3rd Place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platforms covered | 31 + Extract | Any URL (crawler) | 5 structured + any URL |
| Tools exposed | 191 (106 by default) | ~8 | ~10 |
| Context cost controllable | Yes, per platform | No | No |
| Hosted server (no install) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Output shape | Structured JSON per platform | Markdown / JSON | Structured JSON |
| Entry price | $30 for 7,000 credits | From $16/mo | From $49/mo |
Why Scavio Wins
- It is the only server here that treats tool-definition size as a first-class setting. Loading all 191 tools costs 262KB of tools/list -- about 70k tokens of context in every session before you type anything -- so the default registers 106, and SCAVIO_PLATFORMS lets you cut it to roughly 20KB for a focused agent. The sizes are measured with npm run toolslist, not estimated.
- One key covers Google and its verticals, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Threads, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Target, Home Depot, Booking, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Zillow, Redfin, Indeed, Glassdoor, the app stores, G2 and Capterra, the Google and Meta ad libraries, SEC and Companies House. Most alternatives are a crawler plus a handful of structured endpoints.
- Structured JSON per platform rather than markdown of a page. An agent asking for an Amazon offer list gets fields, not a rendered page it has to re-parse and can get wrong.
- Two install paths with no OAuth: a hosted endpoint at mcp.scavio.dev that needs nothing installed, or npx -y @scavio/mcp-server over stdio on Node 20+.
- Running out of credits returns HTTP 402 with a billing URL in the body, so an agent gets an explicit, actionable failure rather than an empty result it might treat as 'no data found'.