I have spent the last six months shipping a Laravel MCP server to production for an internal AI assistant. The install was trivial. The bill was not. If you are a CTO or engineering lead scoping an MCP integration on top of Laravel, this is the honest Laravel MCP implementation cost breakdown I wish someone had handed me on day one. Quick context if you're new to MCP: it's the open protocol Anthropic released in November 2024 that lets AI clients talk to your application through a standardized JSON-RPC interface. As of March 2026, MCP hit 97 million monthly SDK downloads and 81,000+ GitHub stars , with every major AI vendor on board. Laravel's official MCP package launched a public beta in September 2025, and production builds are now happening across fintech, healthcare, and SaaS. Here's where the money actually goes. Why Laravel MCP Implementation Cost Doesn't Look Like a Standard API Build A normal Laravel API build is predictable.…