Launch HN: Manufact (YC S25) – MCP Cloud

Pietro and Luigi, the founders behind mcp-use, spent the last year watching the ground shift under their own product. They started in April 2025 building SDKs so agents could talk to any MCP server. Then the big labs shipped their own agent harnesses — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode — and suddenly the standalone agent framework business looked shaky. So the team pivoted to the other end of the pipe: the servers themselves. That bet is what became Manufact, a hosting and deployment platform built specifically for MCP, launching today out of YC's Summer 2025 batch.

The timing lines up with a string of moves from the platforms. OpenAI rolled out its Apps SDK in October, letting ChatGPT render interactive UIs through MCP. Anthropic expanded its connector directory. And in January, MCP Apps became an official extension of the spec, giving every client a shared way to render UI instead of everyone inventing their own. Manufact's founders point to one data point that makes the stakes obvious: an Amplitude engineer reported a 2x jump in MCP retention just from adding a UI layer. If that number holds up elsewhere, UI-capable MCPs stop being a nice-to-have and start being the whole game.

What Manufact actually sells is the boring-but-necessary layer nobody wants to build themselves. Connect a GitHub repo, and it auto-detects your framework, spins up a live MCP URL, and gives you a chat interface to poke at it before shipping. Push to a branch, get a preview deployment. Before you submit to the Claude or ChatGPT stores, Manufact runs automated tests that install your server inside the actual client — not a raw model call, the real harness — so you find out if Claude Desktop chokes on your tool schema before a reviewer does. There's also a pre-flight checklist meant to catch the stuff that gets submissions bounced, plus usage analytics broken down by tool calls and client type once you're live.

The pitch rests on a comparison worth sitting with: if AI chat apps are becoming the new browsers, MCP servers are the new websites, and right now most companies are publishing the equivalent of a raw API dump with no design sense, no auth strategy beyond an API key stuffed in a URL, and no idea the spec changed three times since they shipped. Manufact is betting that gap — between