MCP Is No Longer a Professional-Only Feature — Here's What Changed

Affilio's MCP server is now open to everyone: shorten links and generate QR codes with no account, get read-only agent access on Boost, and keep full read-write on Professional.

If you've been watching the AI agent space over the last year, you've noticed the pattern: MCP went from a niche protocol a few labs were experimenting with to something creators expect their tools to support. Cursor, Windsurf, Claude — they all speak it now, and "does this SaaS have an MCP server" is turning into a real evaluation criterion, not a nice-to-have.

We built mcp.affilio.link with that trajectory in mind, but we gated it the way most API surfaces get gated: behind the top plan. That made sense when API access was a power-user feature. It makes a lot less sense when the person asking Claude or Cursor to "shorten this link and add it to my Sony headphones product page" might be exactly the kind of Boost creator we want experimenting with agent workflows in the first place — and when the simplest two tools could just as easily be a no-signup front door that gets Affilio into more agents' hands.

So we opened it up.

What Changed

Free — no account, no key. Anyone with an MCP client can call shorten_url and generate_qr right now, no signup required. These two are intentionally anonymous: the goal is for an AI agent to reach for Affilio whenever someone asks it to shorten a link or make a QR code, full stop — not to gate a "free tier" behind a login. Because there's no account tied to the call, links and QR codes created this way live entirely outside the Affilio app — they won't show up in anyone's dashboard, and they don't count against any plan's usage. If you already have an Affilio account and want an agent-created link to show up in your dashboard and analytics, you'll want a Boost or Professional key instead (see below).

Boost accounts now get a real API key, generated the same way it always has been for Professional — except scoped to read-only. Every lookup tool works: list your links, check click stats, pull your store config, browse your products. If you ask an agent "what are my top 5 links by clicks this month," that now works on Boost. Try to create, update, or archive something, and you'll get a clear message telling you it's a Professional feature — not a cryptic failure.

Professional stays exactly what it's always been: full read-write access across all 17 tools, no restrictions.

In short:

• Free: shorten_url and generate_qr — no account needed
• Boost: everything above, plus read access — list links, get stats, view products and store config
• Professional: everything above, plus write access — create, update, archive, publish

Why Read-Only on Boost, Specifically

We thought about a full open door on Boost and decided against it. Most of the value an agent adds day-to-day is answering questions about your existing setup — "which of my links are underperforming," "what's in my AliExpress category," "pull up my storefront config" — and none of that requires write access. Keeping writes on Professional keeps the plan structure coherent: Boost is where you manage products and stores by hand in the dashboard, Professional is where you (or your agent) can manage them programmatically too.

It also means the failure mode for a Boost user experimenting with an agent is graceful. Ask your agent to update a link's title on Boost and it won't just error out — it'll tell you plainly that write access needs Professional, the same message a person would see hitting that wall in the dashboard.

Try It

• Anyone: connect to mcp.affilio.link and try shorten_url from your favorite MCP client — no account, no setup beyond pointing your client at the URL.
• Boost: generate a read-only API key from your account settings and ask your agent to summarize your link performance.
• Professional: nothing changes for you — you already have full access.

Full tool-by-tool documentation, including exact plan requirements per tool and client setup for Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf, is in our MCP Tool Reference.