MCP-as-a-Service: Why Enterprises Don't Run Their Own Browser MCPs

The MCP ecosystem is maturing fast, and a familiar pattern is playing out: open-source tools built for developer convenience are hitting enterprise procurement walls, and managed services are filling the gap.

It happened with databases (self-hosted Postgres → RDS). It happened with message queues (self-hosted Redis → Upstash). It's happening with browser MCPs now.

What "run your own" looks like in practice

A developer installs Playwright MCP or browser-use locally, adds it to their Claude Desktop config, and it works great. Then they want to roll it out to a team of 20, or they want it running in a CI pipeline, or their security team asks where the browser process is executing and what data it's touching.

The answers to those questions — "on each developer's machine," "we haven't figured that out," and "we don't know" — are what stop enterprise rollouts.

Self-hosted MCPs weren't designed for multi-user deployment, centralized access control, or compliance reviews. They're designed for local use by the developer who set them up.

What enterprises actually need

Enterprise procurement for any developer tool follows the same checklist:

• Uptime SLA — Is there a contractual guarantee? Who do we call when it's down?
• Audit logs — What actions were taken? What URLs were visited? What data left the system?
• Access control — Can we scope API keys by team or project? Can we rotate credentials centrally?
• Security review — Is there a SOC 2? A vendor questionnaire we can fill out? A DPA we can sign?
• Support — Is there a human we can contact, or a GitHub issue tracker?

A locally-installed open-source MCP server answers none of these. It's not a vendor — it's a script running on a laptop. Even platform-level MCP integrations are showing the same fragility: teams are reporting lost MCP configurations after routine upgrades, with no recovery path and no one to call.

PageBolt is already the managed option

PageBolt's MCP server is a thin client that makes outbound HTTPS calls to PageBolt's hosted infrastructure. The browser doesn't run locally. The execution environment is managed. API keys are rotatable and scoped. Every request is logged.

From the procurement checklist:

Requirement	Self-hosted Playwright MCP	PageBolt MCP
Hosted infrastructure	❌	✅
Audit logs	❌	✅ (per-request logs)
Centralized access control	❌	✅ (API key management)
Security questionnaire	❌ (no vendor)	✅
No local browser process	❌	✅

This isn't a feature PageBolt added — it's the architecture. Hosted execution means the enterprise security review is "can our developers make HTTPS calls to pagebolt.dev?" instead of "can we audit every browser operation on every developer's machine?"

The first question has a yes/no answer and a one-week review timeline. The second question doesn't have a clean answer at all.

The MCP-as-a-service model

As AI agents become standard parts of enterprise workflows, "bring your own MCP server" will follow the same path as "bring your own database." It works fine until it doesn't — and then teams reach for the managed option that has an SLA and a support email.

PageBolt is that option for browser automation and web capture. One API key, hosted infrastructure, logs by default, no browser process on your machine.