MCP tool cost: 20 job Actors on Apify, 2.1K to 32.7K tokens each
Here is what an agent pays before it asks a job-search tool anything. I pinned 20 job-search Actors from the Apify Store, one at a time, on the hosted Apify MCP server and read what tools/list sends back. The smallest tool definition was 2,139 tokens. The median was 3,829. One was 32,737, and 32,136 of those tokens were an output schema the server had inferred from the Actor's results; the…
An agent's cost before querying a job-search tool is significant. Twenty job-search Actors from Apify's Store were pinned to the hosted Apify MCP server, revealing varying token counts for tool definitions. The smallest tool definition was 2,139 tokens, while the largest was 32,737. The median token count was 3,829, with 32,136 of those belonging to one tool, which consisted solely of an output schema inferred by the server from Actor results.
The author's own input schema, however, was much smaller at 406 tokens. Three of the twenty tools were created by the author, allowing for a check on their work. This investigation occurred on October 28, 2026, and involved a simple curl handshake that could be repeated on any Actor within a minute.
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