By ByteBot
Anthropic just opened official distribution for MCP tools. The Claude Marketplace went live September 23 with more than 2,000 connectors, plugins, and Claude-powered agents. Two days later, a developer submission portal opened at claude.ai/directory/manage — and for the first time, any developer on a paid Claude plan can submit a connector or plugin bundle directly to Anthropic’s catalog, no partnership agreement required. Here’s what it takes to get listed.
How to Get Your Tool Into the Catalog
The portal accepts two formats. Pick whichever matches what you’ve already built.
Single MCP connector: The faster path. Point the portal at a live, HTTPS-accessible MCP server. That’s it — one URL, one submission. Works well for focused, single-purpose integrations.
Plugin bundle: For more complex builds. Host a repo on GitHub combining MCP servers, Agent Skills, and optionally interactive UI components, commands, or agents. Plugins can package all of those pieces or just one — Anthropic’s documentation explicitly says a single-piece plugin is complete. Submit the repo URL through the portal.
Being an Anthropic partner is not a prerequisite. Access requires a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise).
What You Need Before You Submit
This is the checklist developers skip and then get rejected on. Before hitting submit:
- MCP server is live, deployed, and reachable via HTTPS
- OAuth 2.0 implemented if your tool requires authentication
- All MCP tools have safety annotations and human-readable titles (not just machine-readable IDs)
- Privacy policy and terms of service published at public URLs
- A support channel exists and is reachable
- Three or more example prompts prepared showing real use cases
The safety annotations requirement trips up a lot of server implementations written before Anthropic tightened this. If you built your MCP server six months ago, audit the tool definitions before submitting.
The Review Pipeline
Submission kicks off three stages: automated validation, safety scanning, and status tracking with recommended changes. Once you clear those, publication is developer-controlled — Anthropic doesn’t push you live without your action.
The catch: Anthropic hasn’t published its safety scan criteria. The company has said that integrations touching sensitive data or requiring elevated permissions will face harder scrutiny, but the specific thresholds are opaque. There’s also no disclosed approval timeline. Plan for days, not hours.
The upside is visibility throughout the process. The portal shows where your submission is, surfaces any recommended changes, and lets you iterate before final review. It’s not a black box — you’ll know what’s blocking you.
What Landing In the Catalog Gets You
After publication, the portal surfaces post-launch analytics: install counts by product surface and version, listing view numbers, and search performance data showing how users discover your plugin. That feedback loop is useful for improving listings and prioritizing feature work.
The bigger distribution story is enterprise. Organizations using Claude on committed spend can purchase marketplace products using that budget — meaning your tool can reach enterprise stacks without separate procurement conversations. That’s real distribution, and it’s something third-party MCP directories can’t offer.
Note that the revenue model is unresolved. Anthropic hasn’t disclosed a revenue-sharing structure for marketplace listings. The current value proposition is distribution and credibility, not direct income from the catalog itself.
Build on the Current MCP Spec
If you’re starting a new connector today, build against MCP specification 2026-07-28 — the stateless version. The old stateful protocol is being phased out. The current spec makes every request self-contained, meaning your server scales horizontally without holding state per client.
Two extensions matter for marketplace submissions. MCP Apps add server-rendered interactive UI inside Claude chat — useful if your tool benefits from visual output. Enterprise Managed Auth enables zero-touch OAuth, where organizations centrally provision access so users get your connector on first login without per-app OAuth flows. If you’re targeting enterprise deployments, EMA support will be expected.
The Ground-Floor Window
The catalog launched with 2,000 listings, which sounds competitive. In practice, most are enterprise partnership entries — Atlassian, Google, Salesforce, the usual names. Independent developer representation is thin. There are more than 11,000 MCP servers in existence and fewer than 5% are monetized through any channel.
The Claude Marketplace is the first-party distribution surface MCP has been missing. Category-defining connectors — the best Notion-to-Linear bridge, the cleanest GitHub analytics plugin — don’t exist in the catalog yet. Developers who move in the next few weeks are entering a sparse catalog with a wide-open discovery surface.
The submission docs are live. The portal is at claude.ai/directory/manage. The early mover window won’t stay open long.
