A: Hey Matteo77,

That's a super insightful question about the future of direct connections vs. relying on external MCP servers! You've hit on a core part of our strategy and how we see the ecosystem evolving.

Here’s the thinking:

1. AgenticFlow as an Official MCP Client
Our primary focus is making AgenticFlow the best client for interacting with any MCP-compliant service (see us listed here: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients#agenticflow). This means we prioritize the usability of connecting to and leveraging MCPs, rather than trying to host and maintain thousands of direct integrations ourselves.

2. The Growing MCP Ecosystem
You're right, relying on providers like Pipedream for some MCPs is a current state, but not the end-state. MCP is new, and we're seeing rapid adoption:

- Zapier: https://zapier.com/mcp
- Make.com: https://developers.make.com/mcp-server
- Composio: http://mcp.composio.dev/

This gives you, the customer, choices for MCP providers, many with generous free tiers.

3. Democratizing MCP Hosting (Vercel Example)
Vercel just announced MCP support about 4 days ago! My plan is to create a tutorial and open-source some boilerplate code so any AgenticFlow user can easily deploy their own MCP server on Vercel (which has a great free tier). This means you could host your own connections for many services without ongoing costs from an MCP provider.

4. First-Party MCPs from Big Players
The trend we're seeing (and encouraging) is for major software companies to release and host their own official MCP servers. Atlassian is a great example: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/remote-mcp-server. When companies like Google (for Drive, Sheets, etc.) or DeepSeek host their own official MCPs, AgenticFlow can connect directly to them. We won't need to "reinvent the wheel" by building custom integrations for every single service if they offer a standard MCP endpoint.

5. In-House Native Integrations (Community-Driven):
For truly core functionalities or very high-demand integrations where a direct, premium connection makes sense, we will continue to build these natively into AgenticFlow. This is driven by community votes on our roadmap: https://agenticflow.featurebase.app/.

- DeepSeek: You're spot on – as an LLM provider, DeepSeek is an excellent candidate for tighter, native integration. Please add it (or vote if it's there) to the roadmap!
- Google Drive: We already have a Google Drive MCP (https://agenticflow.ai/mcp/google_drive). If the community strongly desires an even more "native" or "premium" version with deeper features beyond the standard MCP actions, we'd absolutely consider it based on votes.

We're actively discussing these kinds of integrations with cloud providers like AWS (see their Lambda for MCP work: https://github.com/awslabs/run-model-context-protocol-servers-with-aws-lambda) and Cloudflare (https://blog.cloudflare.com/remote-model-context-protocol-servers-mcp/).

Our Approach: This space is moving incredibly fast. Our strategy is to be the best MCP client, empower users to deploy their own MCPs easily (like with Vercel), leverage first-party MCPs as they emerge, and build native integrations for the most critical/requested services based on your votes.

It's a community-first approach. Please do join our Discord (https://discord.gg/fJ7TM5Cyk9) to be part of these discussions!

Hope this gives you a clearer picture of our direction!
— Sean