mcpgawk Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

mcpgawk is a local guard that pins every MCP tool your agents use and refuses calls to tools that changed after you approved them. The free tier is excellent and honest about its limits; the paid gateway is young and priced per person. Best for: developers running several agents. Price: from GBP 29/mo, free plan yes. Rating: 7.0/10.

What is mcpgawk?

We found mcpgawk on Product Hunt, where it launched on 6 October 2026. It is a security tool for people who connect agents to MCP servers. It reads the agent configs on your machine, lists every server and tool those agents can reach, records what you approved, and blocks any call to a tool whose name or description has changed since. The vendor calls this case a rug pull: a server you trusted last month quietly ships a new tool this month.

The product comes from Nativerse Ventures Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company no. 17247506), which names itself in the terms, privacy policy and site footer. The same company runs gawk.dev, a free live status board for the major AI developer tools. The free engine is a Python package under the Apache-2.0 licence. The paid tier, called mcpgawk Platform, adds a gateway, per-agent keys, a hash-chained audit log and scheduled re-checks.

What Are mcpgawk’s Key Features?

Fleet scan across 21 client configs

One command, installed with uv or pipx from PyPI, reads the MCP configs of 21 clients and lists every server inside them. For each tool it reports a token cost index, whether it can write or reach the network, and which local credentials the server inherits, such as your package-publishing and repository tokens. The threat model is candid that the token number is an index measured with the cl100k tokenizer, not an exact count for any one model. Local stdio servers are never launched without your yes.

Sandboxed verify runs

A scan reads what a server says about itself. The verify command runs the server in a sandbox, watches its outbound HTTP through a proxy, and reports exfiltration, SSRF, tool poisoning and secret leaks. By default it only drives tools it can prove are read-only, and every skipped tool is named as skipped rather than counted as clean. A finding is reproduced in a fresh sandbox before it is reported. This used to be a paid capability and has been free since July 2026, per the site.

The guard hook and the approval gate

This is the headline feature. A hook that runs before each call checks every tool call against the surface you approved and refuses calls to anything new or rewritten. The refusal message names no override, and the approve command refuses to run inside an agent session, so an agent cannot talk its way past the block. The call log records when, which agent, which tool and the decision, but never the tool arguments, so the log does not become a secrets file.

The paid gateway, monitor and audit log

The hook only works in six of the 21 clients, mostly the terminal agents. The other 15 have no hook point, and the gateway is how you cover them: one local endpoint that every agent points at, each with its own key, so a refused call has a name against it. It also inspects arguments and responses for secrets and injection, and can refuse, redact or allow. Monitor re-checks approved servers on a five-minute cycle and alerts to a webhook.

What Is It Like to Use mcpgawk?

We did not install mcpgawk, so this section describes the workflow as the docs and site show it. The first run lists every server, flags the ones that need a sign-in or cannot be reached, and offers to turn protection on in the same pass. A local dashboard on localhost then shows servers, findings, activity and pending decisions. Its action buttons only work through a tokened link printed in your terminal, so an agent that opens the page gets a read-only view.

The docs are unusually good. The CLI reference covers all 21 commands and is printed from the shipped parser, the troubleshooting page lists every exit code, and the vendor runs a public test server that changes its own tools every ten minutes so you can watch a refusal happen. Exit codes are a contract: 0 clean, 1 findings, 4 incomplete, and a run that could not finish is never reported as clean. There is also a CI action, plus editor extensions on the Microsoft and Open VSX marketplaces.

We checked the privacy claims against the source. The Python code contacts the server you point it at, PyPI for a version check you can switch off with an environment variable, public package registries only when you ask for a supply-chain lookup, and the vendor’s own licence endpoint when you log in with a paid key. We saw no analytics library in the Python source, which matches the privacy policy’s no-telemetry line.

Where Does mcpgawk Fall Short?

Free protection reaches only six of 21 clients. If your team works mainly in desktop chat apps or most editor agents, the free hook does nothing for those calls, and the vendor says so plainly. Covering them means the paid gateway, so the free tier is complete only for a specific set of tools.

Its approval pin is a hash of tool names and descriptions. A server that keeps the same names and wording but changes what its code does will not trip the pin; catching that relies on verify runs and the paid monitor. The threat model also says its heuristic signals are tuned on a non-adversarial corpus and are not a guarantee against crafted evasion, and that the audit chain is tamper-evident only up to the last head you ship to storage outside the machine.

The project is very young. The public repo was created in July 2026, had no stars and no open issues when we checked, and has shipped 28 tagged releases, four of them on 5 October alone. The Microsoft marketplace listing for the editor extension showed 9 installs. The paid engine is closed source: it never ships in the public package and is fetched behind your licence key.

The vendor’s own pages disagree on whether the gateway is for sale. The access and billing docs say the gateway is still in beta, costs nothing while the beta runs, and that you request a seat. The terms and refund policy say charging is live at GBP 29 per person per month. The pricing card also says per seat, while the terms define a seat as one machine and sell the plan per person across up to three machines.

How Much Does mcpgawk Cost?

mcpgawk is free for scan, verify, the guard hook, the decide screen, change history and the local dashboard, with no account and no time limit. mcpgawk Platform costs GBP 29 per person per month, covering up to three machines. The pricing page itself shows no number, only 7 days free then per seat, monthly; the GBP 29 figure comes from the terms, the trial page, the page metadata and the hosted checkout, which reads GBP 29.00 billed every month with a 7 day trial.

There are two trial routes. The checkout trial takes a card and converts to a paid month unless you cancel. The no-card trial key gives seven days of full access, after which the paid features pause while the key stays valid to day 30. A 14-day money-back guarantee covers the first paid month, and subsequent renewals are generally non-refundable. Lemon Squeezy, the payment processor, is the merchant of record and works out VAT or sales tax at checkout, so we could not confirm whether GBP 29 includes VAT for every buyer. There is no annual plan.

Against rivals, the free tier is the strong part. The best-known open-source MCP scanners are free too, but the most popular one needs a vendor account and sends tool descriptions to the vendor’s analysis service, while mcpgawk keeps everything local. Container-platform gateways are free and open source, and their paid seats start below mcpgawk’s price. Enterprise MCP gateways mostly hide their prices behind a sales call. Enterprise mcpgawk is custom-priced too.

Who is mcpgawk Best For?

Use mcpgawk if you run terminal agents that take a hook against a growing list of MCP servers and want calls to changed tools refused on your own machine, with nothing uploaded. The free tier alone is worth installing for the fleet inventory and the credential warnings. Security leads who need per-agent attribution and an audit log for a review are the target buyers for the paid gateway.

Skip mcpgawk if most of your agent use happens in clients without a hook point and you are not ready to pay per person for the gateway. Skip it too if your security team needs a vendor with a long track record, a SOC 2 report or a large user count; none of that exists yet. Teams that already standardise on a container-based MCP setup may find a free gateway there covers the routing side.

Best mcpgawk Alternatives

Snyk Agent Scan

The scanner formerly known as mcp-scan is free and Apache-2.0 licensed, with about 3,100 stars, and covers MCP servers and the skill files agents load. It needs a Snyk account and token and runs its analysis through Snyk’s service. Snyk’s paid Team plan starts at $25 per month, and its agent-security capabilities sit in the Enterprise plan at a quoted price.

Docker MCP Gateway

Docker’s MCP gateway is open source under MIT and powers the MCP Toolkit in Docker Desktop, with secrets management for server credentials. The gateway itself is free. Docker Pro costs $11 per user per month billed monthly or $9 billed yearly, and Docker sells a separate enterprise MCP gateway through sales.

MCP Manager

MCP Manager by Usercentrics is a hosted gateway for teams, supporting local and hosted MCP servers with unlimited users. It publishes no price: a seven-day trial and any quote both start with an onboarding call. It suits companies that want a managed service rather than a local tool.

Final Verdict: Is mcpgawk Worth It?

The free tier is an easy yes for anyone running agents against MCP servers. It is local, Apache-2.0, unusually honest about what it cannot catch, and the approval gate is designed so an agent cannot lift its own block. The fleet inventory and inherited-credential warnings alone justify the install, and the docs are better than most paid products.

The paid gateway is harder to recommend today. GBP 29 per person per month is steep next to free open-source gateways, the paid engine is closed, the project has almost no public adoption yet, and its own docs still describe the gateway as a free beta while the terms say charging is live. Install the free tier now, use the no-card trial key, and pay only if your agents live mostly in clients without a hook point.