# Manufact (mcp-use)

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/manufact/ · added 2026-11-08 · updated 2026-11-08

**In short.** Manufact (mcp-use) (Cloud platform to host, test and publish MCP servers and MCP apps, United States): Paid plans live and 7 customer stories, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 2 co-founders in 2025; 3 people in March 2026 (VentureBeat); Y Combinator lists 5 in November 2026. Launched 24 July 2025; still running.

Cloud platform to host, test and publish MCP servers and MCP apps · United States · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running · group: Developer tools and coding agents

- Outcome: Paid plans live and 7 customer stories, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: 24 July 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 16
- Team: 2 co-founders in 2025; 3 people in March 2026 (VentureBeat); Y Combinator lists 5 in November 2026
- Outside funding: Y Combinator (Summer 2025); seed round led by Peak XV, announced February 2026 (amount as reported by VentureBeat and the company)
- Main factor: Open source
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 2
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Developer tools

Links:

- Visit manufact.com: https://manufact.com/

**The product.** A cloud for the MCP servers and MCP apps that let AI agents and chat apps use a company's product. A developer connects a GitHub repository, and every push deploys a live MCP endpoint with a preview address for each branch. The platform then tests the server across ChatGPT, Claude and coding agents, checks it against the rules of the ChatGPT and Claude app stores, prepares the store listing, and shows which tools agents call and where calls fail. The same team maintains the open-source mcp-use SDK for TypeScript and Python.

**Why it worked.** The founders wrote mcp-use in early 2025 because, in their words, MCP worked only inside a few closed apps such as Cursor and Claude Desktop. Developers adopted the free library quickly, and then asked how to run their servers in production: deployment, sign-in, monitoring and store review. Manufact is the paid cloud for that step, and in 2026 its pitch moved to companies that want their product listed inside ChatGPT and Claude.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Manufact is a cloud for MCP servers. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that Anthropic introduced in late 2024 so that an AI model can call outside tools; an MCP server is a program that offers such tools, and an MCP app is an MCP server that also returns a piece of user interface that appears inside the chat. Manufact deploys these servers from GitHub, tests them across AI clients, checks them against the store rules of ChatGPT and Claude, and reports how agents use them.

Pietro Zullo and Luigi Pederzani, who met in a co-working space in Zurich, wrote the open-source library mcp-use in early 2025, according to VentureBeat. The company joined Y Combinator in the Summer 2025 batch; VentureBeat reported in March 2026 that it had three people and had raised a US$6.3 million seed round led by Peak XV. Y Combinator lists 5 people in San Francisco in November 2026, and the company's pricing page shows a free plan, a pay-as-you-go plan and a Pro plan that it prices at US$300 a month.

No revenue figure was found, so this story has grade E. The page shows what the product does, its prices, its named customers, and earlier developer platforms that failed.

## Pricing

Manufact prices in November 2026, from the company's pricing page and its FAQ (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free |  | 0 | US$5 of usage a month, 1 project, 1 team member, hard limits |
| Pay as you go |  | 0 plus usage | US$10 of usage a month, 10 projects, 10 team members, spending limits |
| Pro | 250 | 300 | US$300 of usage a month, unlimited projects and members, all regions, Slack support |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | SSO/SAML, self-hosting, role-based access, SLA |

Every plan adds usage charges on top of the included credit: US$0.10 per 1,000 tool calls (falling to US$0.07 above 50 million), US$5.00 per million LLM tokens, US$0.70 per MCP eval run, US$0.07 per build minute and US$0.15 per GB of outgoing data; premium publishing checks cost US$2.00 a run and a store submission pack US$5.00. The FAQ says Pro is US$300 a month, or US$250 a month billed US$3,000 a year. Enterprise terms are set by contract.

## How much revenue does Manufact (mcp-use) make? The numbers, graded

A five-person, YC-backed MCP cloud with open-source roots, public prices, named customers and no published revenue

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue of Manufact | not published | C | No payment-processor profile, filing or interview with a revenue figure was found. VentureBeat headed a section of its March 2026 article "5 million downloads, zero revenue". See "What is not verified". | [4] |
| Named paying customer | AgentMail | C | Company case study, 13 July 2026: "A week after becoming a paying customer, their MCP server was in production." It says AgentMail runs more than 100,000 MCP tool calls a week on Manufact. | [9] |
| Customer stories, November 2026 | 7, dated 28 May to 6 October 2026 | C | Customer stories page: Simera, item, Meilleurtaux, iAhorro, AgentMail, PredictLeads and Alpha Vantage. The stories are written by Manufact; none was checked with the customers. | [8] |
| Founded, team and location | founded 2025; 5 people; San Francisco | C | Y Combinator company page, read 8 November 2026. VentureBeat described a three-person company based in San Francisco and Zurich in March 2026. The company page lists 5 open roles. | [1, 4, 7] |
| Founders | Pietro Zullo and Luigi Pederzani | C | Y Combinator company page and VentureBeat, which calls Pederzani co-founder and co-CEO. Zullo was studying at ETH Zurich; Pederzani had worked at Morgen and Accenture Switzerland. | [1, 4] |
| Funding | Y Combinator, Summer 2025; seed of US$6.3 million led by Peak XV, announced February 2026 | C | VentureBeat, 11 March 2026: Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund and Y Combinator also took part. The company page: "Peak XV led our $6.3M seed." | [4, 7] |
| Prices, November 2026 | Free; pay as you go; Pro US$300 a month or US$250 billed yearly; Enterprise custom | C | Pricing page and home page FAQ. Usage is charged on top of each plan's included credit. | [6, 5] |
| mcp-use SDK adoption | 5 million downloads and 9,000 GitHub stars (March 2026); "10M+" downloads and "10k+" stars (November 2026) | C | VentureBeat for March 2026; home page and Y Combinator page for November 2026. Downloads and stars measure developer interest in the free library, not paying customers. | [4, 5, 1] |
| Listing on Claude | "a surge of signups" | C | Second launch post, 28 July 2026: "We listed Manufact on Claude and saw a surge of signups that is still going on now." No number is given. | [2] |
| Time from the first launch post to the November 2026 status | 16 months | calc | Calculated: 24 July 2025 to November 2026. | [3, 8] |

How to read this table: a grade C value is the company's own statement on its site or in its Y Combinator posts, or a founder statement reported by VentureBeat. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B, and no revenue figure was found.

## When did Manufact (mcp-use) launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From an open-source library written in early 2025 to a paid MCP cloud with published customer stories in November 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **Early 2025** (grade C [4]): Zullo and Pederzani write mcp-use, an open-source library to connect any MCP server to any LLM "in six lines of code". It gets 2,000 to 2,500 GitHub stars within weeks.
- **24 July 2025** (grade C [3, 1]): First Y Combinator launch post, in the Summer 2025 batch: build and deploy MCP servers and MCP apps for ChatGPT and Claude.
- **February 2026** (grade C [4, 7]): The company announces a seed round led by Peak XV. In late February it co-hosts an MCP apps hackathon at Y Combinator with 650 applications and 300 builders.
- **11 March 2026** (grade C [4]): VentureBeat describes a three-person company whose best-known SDK users are not paying customers.
- **May to July 2026** (grade C [8, 9, 2]): Customer stories from Meilleurtaux, iAhorro, item and Simera, then AgentMail as a paying customer. Second launch post on 28 July: an MCP cloud for Claude Connectors and ChatGPT plugins.
- **November 2026** (grade C [1, 6, 8]): Y Combinator lists 5 people; the pricing page shows a free plan, pay as you go and Pro at US$300 a month; seven customer stories are online.

## Why did Manufact (mcp-use) work?

### Open source

The free mcp-use SDK came first and brought the developers; the company page calls it "Open source first. The company followed." The cloud sells the step the library does not cover: running the server in production with sign-in, monitoring and store review.

### Store listings as the reason to buy

The second launch post sells a place in the Claude Connectors marketplace and the ChatGPT plugin store, where a user can install a product in one click inside the chat. Manufact checks a server against each store's rules before review and generates the listing material.

### Usage pricing

The pricing page lists a free plan and a pay-as-you-go plan, and charges per tool call, per test run and per LLM token on top. Small developers can start without a card, and the bill grows with the agent traffic of the customer.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's home page, its pricing page and its Y Combinator launch posts. They are grade C.

- The mcp-use SDKs for TypeScript and Python are open source under the MIT license; the cloud is built on them.
- Deploys run from a GitHub App, from the command line with npx mcp-use deploy, or through Manufact's own MCP server; each branch gets its own MCP address for review.
- Sign-in for servers ships with OAuth presets for Auth0, Better Auth, Clerk, Keycloak, Supabase and WorkOS.
- Test suites run a server's tools across clients and swap the model between GPT, Claude and Gemini, with an LLM judging pass or fail.
- The MCP Inspector, an open-source debugger, runs hosted, locally or in Docker; FastMCP and other frameworks are supported, plus any Dockerfile.
- A developer writes an ordinary React component and the SDK registers it as the user interface of an MCP app.

Sources: [5, 6, 2]

## Who tried this before Manufact (mcp-use), and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups sold hosting or tools to developers, and failed when few users paid or when large clouds offered the same thing. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Mage (2021 to 2023; funding US$2.6M; cause: Unit Economics)

- Promise: An open-source tool that turns Python notebooks into production data pipelines, with a paid hosted version.
- Why it died: Developers liked the free code, but few would pay for the hosted version; GitHub stars did not turn into revenue.
- Record: 

### AppHarbor (2011 to 2014; funding US$500K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Deploy .NET apps from GitHub without managing servers.
- Why it died: AWS and Azure offered broader platforms, and developers moved to other languages.
- Record: 

### Nitrous.io (2012 to 2016; funding US$8M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Cloud development environments with no local setup.
- Why it died: Amazon bought the competitor Cloud9 and offered it free or cheap inside AWS.
- Record: 

## What changed

Mage had a free developer tool that people liked and a hosted version that few paid for. AppHarbor and Nitrous.io sold hosting to developers until the large clouds bundled the same service. Manufact faces both risks: VentureBeat wrote in March 2026 that its best-known SDK users did not pay, and that AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel and Docker had launched MCP hosting features.

Two things differ. The buyer is not only a developer but a product company that wants to appear inside ChatGPT and Claude, and each client and each store has its own rules, so cross-client tests and store checks are work that a general cloud does not do. And by mid-2026 the company had published a case study about a named paying customer, AgentMail, which VentureBeat could not report in March.

## Can one person copy Manufact (mcp-use) now?

**Verdict: Hard for one person.**

The company has a popular open-source SDK, seed funding and a team that works with the MCP maintainers, and it sells infrastructure with security claims to larger companies. A solo founder could copy a narrow part: store checks or tests for MCP apps in one industry, or a hosted MCP server for one kind of product.

1. Write a small open-source library for a new protocol in its first months, and answer every issue.
2. Watch what users of the library ask for after it works on their laptop: hosting, sign-in, logs, store review.
3. Sell that step with a free plan and usage pricing, so a developer can start without talking to sales.
4. Publish customer stories with dates and names as soon as the first companies pay.

**What is still open.** Store-review checks, tests and analytics for MCP apps in one regulated industry, such as banks or insurers, where the rules matter more than hosting.

## What could go wrong for Manufact (mcp-use)?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure for Manufact was found. We looked for a payment-processor profile, a founder interview with figures and a filing. VentureBeat wrote on 11 March 2026 that the company had "not yet demonstrated a scalable revenue model" and that "Its most high-profile users are not paying customers"; Pederzani told VentureBeat that the target was US$2 million to US$3 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026, which is a goal, not a result. Since then the pricing page shows paid plans and one case study names AgentMail as a paying customer. Other traction claims are the company's own and were not checked: "larger companies in finance, insurance, and marketplaces run their MCP apps on Manufact" (launch post, 28 July 2026, no names), "#1 recommended deployment option in OpenAI's docs" (same post), and "used by developers at 20% of US500" (first launch post, whose page shows an edit on 8 November 2026). The home page shows company logos under "Our open source tools are used by developers at top companies"; VentureBeat reports that such big-name users use the free SDK and do not pay. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile or a Series A announcement with revenue.
- **Competition.** VentureBeat lists AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel and Docker as clouds that launched MCP hosting features. On this site, Metorial (an MCP gateway with paid plans) and Smithery (an MCP registry acquired by Arcade.dev in August 2026) are the closest stories; Manufact differs by focusing on store checks and cross-client tests for MCP apps.
- **Dependence on AI clients and model providers.** Manufact does not make a model. Its main promise is a listing in the stores of OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude Connectors), whose review rules it cannot control; its test suites call GPT, Claude and Gemini, and the pricing page resells LLM tokens at US$5.00 per million. The company page says it works "closely with MCP maintainers and teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor". If these providers build their own hosting and checks, part of the value moves to them.
- **A small team with a large plan.** VentureBeat counted three employees in March 2026 and noted that the seed round "provides limited runway" for an infrastructure company; Y Combinator listed 5 people in November 2026, and the company page advertises 5 open roles. The security claims on the pricing page (SOC 2 and ISO 27001 on the Pro plan) were not checked against an audit report.

## Sources

1. Y Combinator company page: Manufact — https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/manufact (grade C). Read in full, 8 November 2026. Source for the founders, founding year, team size, location, batch, description and open roles.
2. Y Combinator Launches, 28 July 2026: Manufact: MCP Cloud for your Claude Connector & ChatGPT Plugin — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/RxG-manufact-mcp-cloud-for-your-claude-connector-chatgpt-plugin (grade C). Read in full. Company's second launch post. Source for the store pitch, the signups after the Claude listing, the production claim and the React component feature.
3. Y Combinator Launches, 24 July 2025: Manufact (mcp-use) - Build and deploy MCP Servers for AI Agents & MCP Apps for ChatGPT / Claude users — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/O2c-manufact-mcp-use-build-and-deploy-mcp-servers-for-ai-agents-mcp-apps-for-chatgpt-claude-users (grade C). Read in full. The page data gives a creation date of 24 July 2025 and an update on 8 November 2026, so its figures are not used as July 2025 figures. Source for the launch date and the "20% of US500" claim.
4. VentureBeat, 11 March 2026, by Michael Nuñez: Manufact raises $6.3M as MCP becomes the 'USB-C for AI' powering ChatGPT and Claude apps — https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/manufact-raises-usd6-3m-as-mcp-becomes-the-usb-c-for-ai-powering-chatgpt-and (grade C). Read in full. Interviews with both founders. Source for the origin story, the seed round, the team of three, the SDK figures, the zero-revenue statement, the revenue target and the competitors.
5. Manufact home page, read 8 November 2026 — https://manufact.com/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the product, the FAQ (deploys, sign-in, tests, Inspector, prices), the customer quotes, the logo walls and the SDK figures.
6. Manufact pricing page, read 8 November 2026 — https://manufact.com/pricing (grade C). Read in full. Source for the plans, included usage and usage rates.
7. Manufact company page, read 8 November 2026 — https://manufact.com/company (grade C). Read in full. Source for the seed round, the open-source origin, the work with model providers and the open roles.
8. Manufact customer stories page, read 8 November 2026 — https://manufact.com/customer-stories (grade C). Read in full. Source for the seven customer stories and their dates.
9. Manufact blog, 13 July 2026: How AgentMail handles 100k+ agent tool calls with Manufact — https://manufact.com/blog/agentmail-mcp-server-case-study (grade C). Read in full. Written by Manufact. Source for AgentMail as a paying customer and its tool-call volume.
10. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Manufact (mcp-use)? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Manufact (mcp-use)).