The MCP Census

Check whether an MCP server is safe to install, with registry, security and policy records. Remote MCP at https://api.mcpcensus.com/mcp.

Hosted MCP Server

npx add-mcp 'https://api.mcpcensus.com/mcp'

Installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and more

Documentation

The MCP Census developer portal

This portal is how you call The MCP Census from an agent or from CI. The live API is the sandbox. Unmetered stats need no account.

curl -s https://api.mcpcensus.com/v1/stats

Human page: https://mcpcensus.com/developers.

Product: The MCP Census (also MCP Census, mcpcensus). Domain: https://mcpcensus.com. Contact: info@mcpcensus.com.

Quickstart

  1. Optional key: https://mcpcensus.com/account — header x-api-key.
  2. Agents: add MCP https://api.mcpcensus.com/mcp (see https://mcpcensus.com/agent-setup/prompt.md).
  3. REST: GET https://api.mcpcensus.com/v1/search?q= then POST /v1/preflight or GET /v1/stamp with one exact canonical name.
  4. Stop on BLOCK. Ask a human on REVIEW. PASS is not a sandbox. Never install from a Census result alone.

Developer resources

Sandbox

No separate staging host. The live MCP Census API is the sandbox.

  • Anonymous: 10 unique lookups/day per IP
  • Free account: 1,000 credits/UTC month. Builder $19/mo, pack $9, team $49/mo
  • Search/lookup 1, preflight/stamp 5, watch 10. Repeats same UTC day are free
  • Empty wallet: HTTP 402 payment_required → https://mcpcensus.com/pricing
  • Unmetered: /v1/stats, /v1/recent, /v1/coverage, /v1/policies, census_credits
curl -s https://api.mcpcensus.com/v1/stats
curl -s "https://api.mcpcensus.com/v1/search?q=github"
curl -s https://api.mcpcensus.com/v1/policies

Auth

Keys are minted on the account page. Send x-api-key. Anonymous works until the daily unique cap. Lost keys are emailed, never shown in page HTML.

Stamp: GET /v1/stamp or MCP census_stamp. Lookalikes: census_lookalikes. Wallet: census_credits / GET /v1/credits.

Webhooks

POST https://api.mcpcensus.com/v1/watch (API key). Events only on observed transitions: remote_down / remote_up, health_change, verified_change, security. Headers: X-Census-Event, X-Census-Signature (sha256 HMAC), X-Census-Watch-Id.