A list of MCP servers (100 active ones), and why your agent needs a list, not ten pages

Ask an agent for "every MCP server on GitHub with more than 500 stars that was pushed to in the last month" and watch what happens. It searches. It opens ten pages. It reads ten READMEs, hits the context limit around the time it gets interesting, and hands you a tidy list of ten. You asked for all of them.

That isn't the agent being lazy. It was given page tools, and a page tool returns pages. Reading them, remembering them and turning them into rows is the agent's job, one page at a time, on a meter that runs per call.

A list tool takes the sentence and returns the rows. Here is one, asked over MCP:

100 MCP servers on GitHub with more than 500 stars, pushed to in the last month, with their star count and language

The 100 rows are here, no account needed.

Ten of the 100

Star counts and push dates are as of the run on October 8, 2026.

The whole list, in numbers: 41 TypeScript, 33 Python, 7 Go, 6 JavaScript, and a handful of C#, Java and C. Stars run from 506 to 47,362. Nine repos have more than 10,000 stars and 32 have fewer than 1,000. Seventy-six were pushed to on or after October 1. Every row carries a one-line reason it's on the list.

Where the list is wrong

• The biggest repo on it is not a server. The top row, agentic-awesome-skills at 47,362 stars, reads as a skills collection whose description mentions a local MCP. The reading of "MCP server" let it in. Two official SDKs, for Python and TypeScript, got in the same way: they build servers, they aren't servers. So did a Laravel package for building them.
• Five repos are named just "mcp." A name column alone can't tell them apart. The reason on each row names the owner (Microsoft, Cloudflare, Laravel).

This is the kind of thing you tighten in the sentence, not in a filter you maintain. Add "excluding SDKs and collections of skills or examples" and run it again. When the list is wrong, you say what's wrong in words.

Page tools and list tools

Neither is better. They answer different questions.

Page tools are priced by the call, and the call count is whatever the agent decides it needs. A list tool quotes the most it can cost before it starts: 10¢, 30¢ or $1 a match depending on how much each row carries, and only rows that meet every part of the request are charged. A run that finds nothing is free.

There's also a context problem. A long run keeps working until it reaches the count, up to four hours on the largest lists. Your agent's context window runs out long before row 300. The run doesn't depend on it.

One line of setup

SpecStream is a remote MCP server at https://api.specstream.ai/mcp. In Claude Code, with an API key from Agents & API in the workspace:

claude mcp add --transport http specstream https://api.specstream.ai/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"

Cursor, VS Code, ChatGPT and Perplexity have their own steps in the setup guides, and the MCP docs cover OAuth sign-in if you'd rather skip the key. It's 97 tools; your client finds them with tools/list.

Then ask in the sentence above. The agent works through four tools, and you only see the one that spends:

1. compile reads the request into editable parts and shows you anything ambiguous.
2. quote_capacity_work returns the price for that exact request. Quotes last 30 minutes.
3. authorize_capacity_work runs it. It takes the quote, the maximum you approved and a stable key, so a retry never buys the same list twice.
4. list_find_rows returns the rows, each with its source.

Reading and pricing cost nothing. Only the third call spends, and never past the approved maximum.

A key can be made small. Give it read, prepare or execute scope, limit it to the projects the task needs, and put a spending ceiling and an expiry on it. An agent that can only read can't spend. An API key is not a blank check.

Agents that pay for themselves

Sometimes there's no account and no person to approve. The agent has a wallet and a task. For that case there's a front door that takes a machine payment instead of a key.

1. POST https://api.specstream.ai/v1/agent/lists with {"request": "<the list in plain words>", "count": 100} (count is 1 to 500).
2. You get 402 Payment Required. The body shows how the request was read, the columns and the most it can cost.
3. Pay with a card through Stripe's Link agent wallet (MPP), or in USDC on Base, Arbitrum or Polygon with x402. Send the same request again with the payment attached.
4. You get a 202 with a status URL. The rows are there when the run ends.

You pay for the results found. With x402, the agent signs for the most it can cost, nothing moves at signing, and only what the run found is taken when it ends. The longer write-up is in agents.md.

Keep it current

Repos get abandoned. "Pushed to in the last month" is true on one day and false on another. Save the request and it reruns on a cadence from hourly to yearly, inside a per-run and per-period spending limit. Rechecks cost half. New matches go to Slack, a sheet or a webhook, and the ones that stopped matching are labeled. Your agent can set that up through the same server. Schedules docs.

What it costs

You start with $10 of work free, once, no card. After that it's pay as you go from $10, or a plan from $19 a month that turns its full price into work. Same rates everywhere, and the maximum is on screen before anything runs. Pricing. The API docs have the same flow over HTTP if your agent speaks REST better than MCP.

If you build agents: which list does yours ask for most that it currently gets back as ten pages? Companies, repos, tenders, papers? Tell me in the comments and I'll run it and post the rows.

We build SpecStream. The rows above are from a real run on October 8, 2026 (list fnd_0nc2sga086d53whbkc7jsgb6je). This post first appeared on the SpecStream blog.