Higress MCP Marketplace

What is Higress MCP Marketplace?

Higress MCP Marketplace is an open-source platform built on top of Higress, an AI-native API gateway originally developed inside Alibaba and now widely used on Alibaba Cloud. The marketplace was launched in April 2025 to solve a specific and painful problem: converting the massive existing ecosystem of REST APIs into MCP-compatible tools is a “repetitive physical task” that requires writing and maintaining custom server code for every API change.

Higress eliminates this with a declarative YAML-based openapi-to-mcp tool: define your API in a config file, and Higress generates and hosts the corresponding remote MCP server automatically — no custom code required, and no re-deployment when the API changes.

The core problem it addresses

Most MCP servers that exist today have been handcrafted for specific APIs. This is fine for a handful of integrations, but becomes unsustainable at enterprise scale. Higress takes a different approach: treat API-to-MCP conversion as a platform capability, not a per-integration coding task. The entire process takes a few minutes per API, and the Higress team has already converted dozens of popular services this way.

What’s available in the marketplace today?

• Wolfram Alpha — computational knowledge engine (free via the marketplace)
• Code Interpreter — execute and analyze code (free via the marketplace)
• Stock & financial data — candlestick charts, real-time quotes, rankings for A-shares, Hong Kong, US stocks, futures, and forex
• Geolocation & time calibration — IP-based location and timezone tools
• Blockchain explorer (Blockscout) — EVM-compatible chain data, NFTs, token metadata
• And more added regularly by the open-source community

All hosted services are maintained by the Higress team. Each account gets up to 10 free calls per day per tool.

Enterprise-grade capabilities

Because Higress is built on Envoy (the same proxy used by Istio and major cloud providers), the marketplace inherits production-grade gateway features:

• Authentication and authorization at the gateway level — no auth code in your MCP server
• Rate limiting and traffic control per tool or per API key
• Automatic protocol upgrades — MCP servers deployed on Higress support Streamable HTTP without any code changes when the MCP spec updates
• Observability and metrics for every MCP tool call
• 99.99% availability SLA on Alibaba Cloud

Self-hosted enterprise marketplace

Higress MCP Marketplace is also a complete reference implementation that enterprises can deploy internally. With HiMarket (the enterprise edition), organizations can build a private AI capability marketplace covering MCP servers, LLM APIs, and agent APIs — all managed through a unified admin portal and developer portal, with metering and billing support on the roadmap.

Open source

The core Higress project is open-source under Apache 2.0 on GitHub. Contributions from API maintainers to list their APIs on mcp.higress.ai are welcome via the public repository.