It's probably good news for users and open source though, why would you pay for something if a free tool with an MCP can do it.
For products for which this is true resorting to whitelisting clients simply accelerates your obsolescence by creating a temporary market for products that are MCP, and open agent, friendly.
I only found out about Figma's limitation when I was trying to add the remote MCP server to GitHub Copilot Desktop and kept running into errors. Turns out they whitelisted GitHub Copilot CLI but not the Desktop app and had put a pause on enabling any more vendors. Eventually someone (not sure which side) got it working.
Kind of strange to limit edit access only to the Remote MCP when their competitors like Pen[1] and Paper[2] allow any local agent to edit.
The key to making it token efficient was allowing Claude to invent its own plaintext markup format for the lens output.
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/mcp-in-practice/
MCP is only as useful as the servers people use are open.
The obvious play to "extract value" from that is to restrict access to bots and offer LLM integration themselves, for a fee.
> on the figma mcp, we've had an email thread going on for 8 months trying to get it setup in opencode
> they seem very concerned with the labs competing with them
> finally got unblocked after i sent this email and it'll be rolled out in a week or so
The email:
> looking through the legal stuff the amount of things in there seems pretty crazy
> this is just an mcp server, there are thousands of them. we're not going to treat figma like its special
> we've been talking about this for this entire year, i don't think this makes much sense and i don't want my team burning more time on this
> once again, for a simple mcp server
thdr•1h ago