Tracking Usage and Metered Billing for MCP Products

JD Fiscus (nerding.io) shares how a late-night hack connecting MCP to n8n exploded to ~1M downloads, then demos practical MCP workflows: indexing YouTube channels for Q&A, and auto-building n8n flows from natural language. We dig into the Agentic Commerce Protocol, real security pitfalls (like destructive commands), and how to turn MCPs into products with OAuth and Stripe for authentication and metered billing. He closes with how he teaches this hands-on at the Vibe Coding Retreat.Timestamps1:00 Why build it: “MCP shouldn’t be Claude-only”—bridging MCP into n8n early (Dec/Jan)2:09 Shipping under the pseudonym nerding.io; surprise seeing creators use it2:25 n8n later ships its own MCP server/client; they nod to nerding.io & Simon3:59 “N8n is useful, but so much more useful with MCP”5:12 What MCP means for software: every smart company is exposing an MCP; new login/usage patterns6:27 Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP): Stripe + OpenAI; agents checkout across the web8:02 Marketing to agents not humans? SEO shifts as agents comparison-shop9:10 Early “agent mode” attempts vs protocol-based purchases (less hacky)10:58 Likely adopters: platforms (Shopify) & big retailers; echoes of early MCP evolution14:11 Security realities: token passing evolved to OAuth; hallucination + destructive actions risk16:04 Personal mishap: agent ran supabase reset on a dev DB—imagine prod! Guardrails matter17:03 Designing MCP servers: don’t just “wrap your API”; use resources/prompts for agentic UX19:04 Demo 1—Influencer MCP: index a YouTube channel, embed transcripts, ask questions in Claude20:54 Storage: embeddings into Postgres; per-channel tables24:46 Keeping it fresh: daily cron to ingest new videos25:18 Demo 2—Build n8n workflows from chat using N8N MCP (by Ramullet); live docs + API27:00 “Create a webhook → send leads to Sheets” built conversationally, with allow/deny prompts31:02 Zapier, Gumloop: agents that build automations via natural-language steps34:00 Next frontier: custom connectors (Claude/Cursor/OpenAI), OAuth auth flows for MCPs39:03 Turning MCPs into products: login with Twitter → Stripe subscription → metered billing41:12 Paid tool call demo: “paid echo” → Stripe usage event logged per user43:41 How to learn this fast: vibecodingretreat.com (small cohorts, hands-on builds)Tools & Technologies Mentioned (quick guide)MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Standard for connecting models to tools/data; supports tools, resources, prompts.n8n — Open-source automation platform; JD wrote an MCP node that went viral; also has native MCP server/client now.Claude / Cursor / OpenAI (custom connectors) — LLM IDEs/chats that can load MCPs; custom connectors enable OAuth + productized access.Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) — Early protocol (Stripe + OpenAI) for agent-initiated purchases with confirmations.Web MCP (W3C-oriented idea) — Emerging patterns for agent↔︎website interactions beyond human UI flows.OAuth — Secure, user-consented authentication for MCPs (vs passing raw tokens).Stripe (subscriptions + metered billing) — Attach billing/usage limits to MCP calls; track per-user consumption.YouTube API + Transcripts — Source data for the “Influencer MCP” indexing pipeline.Embeddings + Postgres — Store vectorized transcript chunks in Postgres for retrieval (JD self-hosts).Cron — Schedules daily ingestion of new content.Google Sheets — Target destination in demo for simple lead funnels.Zapier / Gumloop — Natural-language automation builders; early NLA/agent patterns.Git / CLI commands — Cautionary tale: agents running destructive commands (e.g., resets).Do Browser / Comet Browser — Agentic browsing tools referenced for web actions.Fellow.ai — AI meeting assistant with security-first design; generates precise summaries/action items.Subscribe at⁠ thisnewway.com⁠ to get the step-by-step playbooks, tools, and workflows.