If FastMCP Cloud was any easier, I wouldn't have a job.
- Tobin South, VP AI Agents @ WorkOS
Today, the Prefect team is thrilled to announce the public beta of FastMCP Cloud.
Over the last few months, our open-source FastMCP project has become the de facto standard for building MCP servers. FastMCP 2.0 is downloaded more than a million times a week, and the original FastMCP 1.0, which was vendored into the official MCP SDK by Anthropic, is downloaded 7x more! We’re humbled and blown away by the community's adoption.
But we also see a clear and painful pattern. No matter how easy we made it to build a server, developers consistently hit a brick wall when it comes time to deploy it. Getting an AI-native service into production is a complex dance of cloud hosting, authentication protocols, CI/CD pipelines, and resource sharing – a challenge for any application, let alone a fast-moving frontier technology like MCP.
At Prefect, our obsession is the handshake between developer intent and production outcomes. We operate in the most high-stakes, data-intensive environments on the planet, including many of the world's largest banks and investment firms, ensuring their mission-critical workflows are deployed successfully and automatically.
So when we heard from AI teams at the world's most forward-thinking companies that deploying a simple MCP server had become one of their most frustrating engineering challenges—somehow more complex than their core AI pipelines—we recognized the pattern immediately. For teams on the cutting edge, a critical piece of infrastructure was missing: there was no MCP-native platform they were willing to trust.
This is the challenge Prefect was built for, and seeing the amazing FastMCP community hit this wall inspired us to build the platform the ecosystem deserves.
The goal of FastMCP Cloud is simple: make it as easy to deploy an MCP server as FastMCP makes it to build one.
It’s a batteries-included, one-click path from your GitHub repo to a live, authenticated, and shareable MCP endpoint. No boilerplate, no YAML wrestling, no becoming a reluctant auth expert overnight. It just works, seamlessly supporting both FastMCP 1.0 and 2.0 servers to ensure your existing projects work out of the box.
FastMCP Cloud is the first platform built from the ground up for the unique challenges of hosting, monitoring, and distributing MCP applications. Its observability layer understands the JSON-RPC protocol natively, translating low-level interactions into meaningful insights across all your deployments. Built-in CI/CD automatically builds and deploys new, branched versions of your server whenever a pull request is opened. Authentication is built directly into the platform, making it simple to share servers, connect third-party clients, or use our own.
And because we build both the framework and the platform, new features will always land here first. Soon, running fastmcp deploy will instantly spin up a free, remote server directly from your terminal. And the declarative deployment configurations introduced in the newest version of FastMCP will be fully supported by FastMCP Cloud, making it somehow even easier to get custom servers running no matter what dependencies, lifecycle functions, or additional user-provided state they require.
Since we quietly turned on signups last week, more than a thousand developers have joined FastMCP Cloud and an astounding 93% successfully deployed a server in their first 5 minutes.
The early feedback has been electric:
FastMCP allowed us to have a remote MCP up and running in hours, and we shipped v1 in less than a week. It's ergonomic, well-documented, and the team is extremely responsive. Full send!
- Tanay Mehta, Head of Product @ Crux
We were able to ship a custom MCP for our internal services in minutes with FastMCP.
- Bryan Bischof & Adam Conway, Head of AI & Senior AI Engineer @ Theory Ventures
But solving MCP deployment is only the floor of our ambition.
A protocol is not a product. Many of the first wave of MCP tools simply wrap existing APIs in MCP trappings, but this ignores the fundamental challenge—and opportunity!—that the community is just beginning to confront: we must learn how to design optimal interfaces for a new kind of autonomous user.
This shift in thinking is driven by a fundamental truth: context is expensive. Interfaces built for humans—generous, discoverable, and atomic—will paralyze an agent, polluting its context and driving up costs. The future of agentic AI depends on interfaces that are minimalist, curated, and context-aware. This forms the core of agentic product design.
FastMCP Cloud is the platform where this curation happens. It is the foundation for the “context economy”: an ecosystem where data, business logic, and identity intersect on demand. It is where we will move beyond static servers to dynamic, just-in-time applications: generating servers from existing APIs, remixing tools into perfectly curated interfaces, and delivering them through advanced routing protocols that are programmatic, semantic, and ultimately, agentic.
By providing a trusted, collaborative platform for these services, we create the natural place to solve the ecosystem’s next great challenges: distribution, monetization, identity, and trust.
FastMCP Cloud is the foundation for that future.
FastMCP Cloud is completely free during its beta as we address feedback and introduce features. Our planned pricing mirrors industry standards, including a free hobby tier that supports unlimited servers for personal use. Teams will be able to upgrade for increased usage, visibility, and oversight, and our enterprise-grade plan will follow later this year.
This is all possible because Prefect is a profitable, sustainable, open-core software company. We have almost a decade of experience in delivering truly valuable products alongside fair business models, and we’re proud to be trusted by some of the world’s most respected companies. The tight integration between our open-source and commercial products has always been guided by a core principle that they are complements, not substitutes. We will always build the best, most full-featured open-source frameworks possible, and FastMCP Cloud will succeed by supercharging that framework with opinionated infrastructure, not by holding it back.
FastMCP Cloud is the next step in our mission to build the best possible platform for data and AI engineers.
Happy (AI) Engineering!
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