Skai Reporting Connector vs. Publisher MCPs: Test Results Reveal Up to 90% in Cost Savings

• Skai tested its Reporting Connector against Google’s, Meta’s, and Amazon’s own MCPs, using the same ad accounts.
• Connecting directly to each publisher costs significantly more in tokens for the same questions, and at scale, that gap grows to almost 10 times more expensive.
• A single publisher’s MCP only has that publisher’s data, so it can’t fully answer a question that needs data from more than one publisher. Their tools, for now, are also more cumbersome and complex for the agent to use: of the 25 questions we tested, a single publisher’s MCP fully answered 12. Skai’s connector answered all 25.
• Reporting is just the beginning. As agents take on more marketing work, like budgets, bidding, and optimization, this same cost gap will show up again, at a much bigger scale.

More publishers are shipping their own MCPs every year, and that trend isn’t slowing down. At first glance, this looks like good news. It gives your agents more places to plug in and more to work with. In reality, it means your team ends up relying on a separate connection for every publisher account, learning how each one behaves, and paying for every one of those on top of the last.

I see this trade-off come up constantly as I work with clients’ agents that move out of pilot programs and into daily use. Agents are supposed to make marketing cheaper and faster. But when every publisher account needs its own MCP calls, the cost can climb just as fast as the capability does. Brands and agencies don’t just want an agent that can technically get to their data. They want confidence that getting there won’t turn into one of their biggest expenses as they scale.

So we tested it. Does Skai’s Reporting Connector, an all-in-one connector that covers any number of accounts in each tool call, actually cost less than wiring up each publisher’s MCP? Or does it just look better on paper?

The takeaway? It costs less. Much less. It’s also more likely to finish the job all the way through, and it can do things a publisher’s MCP simply can’t. Here’s what we found, how we got there, and what it means for you, whether you already use Skai’s MCP or you’re still weighing it against the alternative.

How did we test Skai’s MCP against publisher MCPs?

We ran the same reporting questions against live ad accounts in two ways. First, we connected our agents to Google Ads’, Meta’s, and Amazon’s MCPs ourselves. Then we asked the identical questions through Skai’s Reporting Connector.

We did this in two rounds.

The first round covered five tasks marketers handle every week:

• Pulling data for review
• Comparing performance month over month
• Checking pacing against goals
• Looking for halo effects across channels
• Building a cross-channel dashboard

Skai’s connector came out cheaper in every one of these.

For the second round, we wanted to see if that held up under real pressure. We asked 27 reporting and troubleshooting questions, ran each one multiple times, and had independent judges score every answer. This time, we tested against one of the largest publisher MCPs out there.

You can see the complete breakdown, including every question and what it cost on each side, on Skai’s MCP connector efficiency page and in the full benchmark writeup.

What did the test show about cost and reach?

Three things stood out, in order of how much they matter.

Token costs for the same questions: Answering the same questions by going to each publisher’s own MCP directly used about five times more tokens than going through Skai’s Reporting Connector.

Monthly costs at a realistic scale: We modeled a realistic setup: three publishers, 30 accounts apiece, so 90 accounts total, and 300 reporting questions a month.

• Skai’s Reporting Connector: about $40 a month
• Each publisher’s MCP on its own: about $394 a month

That’s almost 10 times more expensive without Skai. That difference doesn’t shrink as you add accounts. It grows. These are modeled figures based on our test data, not a live invoice, but the trend is the real takeaway. The bigger you get, the more you save by using Skai.

Questions a single publisher’s MCP can’t answer: Skai’s advantage at scale was expected. The most surprising finding was the complexity and poor explainability of the publisher MCPs. In the second test, the publisher’s MCP could only fully answer 12 of the 25 questions. The agent got stuck and needed more guidance from us humans to complete the work. Skai’s connector allowed the agent to answer all 25 without interruption. This has nothing to do with speed or price. It’s higher quality, thanks to a better design of the MCP tools.

Why do publisher MCPs cost more than Skai’s MCP?

For cross-account or cross-publisher questions, using the publisher MCPs means your agent needs to run the same data pull per account, then combine it all. That’s a lot of work, and a lot of tokens. Skai already does that on the backend: with Skai’s Reporting Connector, your agent pulls this data once and doesn’t need to work hard to provide the insight.

Moreover, some publishers’ MCPs, with over 100 tools, bring their whole toolkit along for every single question, big or small, so a simple question ends up costing nearly as much as a hard one. Skai’s connector is much more efficient in its tool design, so it only brings what the question actually needs, which drives additional cost savings.

Does Skai’s MCP save money within a single publisher too?

We assumed the savings would mostly show up once you’re dealing with several publishers and reconciling different data formats. That’s not what the data showed.

We tested what happens as you scale up accounts within a single login, going from one account to ten. Skai’s cost barely moved. It went up about 25%. That tells you Skai isn’t charging you more for each account you add. So the savings hold even if every account you manage sits with one publisher, not just when you’re juggling several.

What other benefits does Skai’s MCP offer beyond cost savings?

The cost savings get the headline, but they’re not the only reason to care, especially as agents take on more of your actual work.

Most data connectors are read-only. Skai’s MCPs can write too, so an agent that catches a problem can fix it on the spot instead of just flagging it for someone to deal with later. I wrote more about that in How Write Access MCP Closes the Distance Between Spotting a Problem and Fixing It.

Skai’s MCPs also open up tools we used to keep in the hands of a human media buyer: forecasting, search term analysis, harvesting, optimization, bidding, budget pacing, and budget allocation. Those are proven, battle-tested enterprise-grade tools that your agent can use, without having to spend tokens and many testing cycles to run safely and reliably. A publisher’s own MCP doesn’t have any of that, because it exists to expose that publisher’s data, not Skai’s tools.

And Skai’s MCP logs in once and stays logged in, so it can run through a long batch of work unattended. Some publisher MCPs need someone to step back in and re-approve access partway through.

Add it up, and the real value isn’t the lower cost alone. It’s the lower cost, plus a connector more likely to actually finish the job, plus tools a publisher’s MCP simply doesn’t offer.

What does this mean if you’re using Skai’s MCP or still comparing it to a publisher’s?

If you’re already on Skai’s MCP, take this as confirmation that the architecture is doing exactly what it’s supposed to. Your savings should keep growing as more of your reporting, and eventually your budgets, bidding, and optimization, move through agents.

If you’re still weighing Skai against a publisher’s MCP, use this data to check your own numbers. How many publishers and accounts do you run? How many of your questions cross more than one channel? Those two answers tell you how big that difference is for you specifically.

Either way, I’ve heard the pushback. If this only saves a few hundred or a few thousand dollars a month on reporting, does it even matter? Fair question. The honest answer is that this is the floor, not the ceiling.

Most of the advertisers and agencies we work with are early in their agent journey, often only 5% to 10% of the way there. Today, agents mostly handle some of the reporting work, and some insights and recommendations, usually only for some of the accounts managed by the advertiser or agency, so the savings are real but modest.

That changes as more of the actual work (budget calls, bidding, optimization) shifts from people to their agents. The same percentage savings then apply to a much bigger number. A few thousand dollars a month turns into tens of thousands.

Think about where your agent use is headed, not just where it sits today. It tends to grow fast. What you run through agents now could be 10 or 20 times bigger a year from now, and the savings from choosing Skai’s MCP grow just as fast.

What’s next for Skai’s MCP?

These numbers reflect where we are today, not where we’ll stop. Budget allocation, bidding, dayparting, and forecasting are next on our list, tested the same way. You can follow the complete picture, every question asked and what it costs on both sides, on Skai’s MCP connector efficiency page and in the full benchmark. We’ll publish updated numbers as that work continues.

Here’s the honest version. A publisher’s MCP works, and its answers are usually accurate. But it won’t get cheaper as you scale. It won’t answer questions that cross more than one publisher. It won’t fix a problem instead of just flagging it. And it won’t hand your agents the tools we built for people. Those are the shortcomings we set out to measure, and now we can put numbers to them.

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