Shipping an MCP Server: Desktop App vs Hosted Web App

The useful part

One runs inside a desktop application, on the machine where the data already lives. The other runs as a hosted service behind an account, in front of a multi-tenant database. The interesting part starts after that, when you have to decide where the server runs, how it reaches users, how you update it, what it is allowed to touch, and what happens when the assistant calling it is confidently wrong.

How it works

• 2257 records for producers in a federally regulated vertical: who appeared in a scene, that identity was verified, which paperwork is signed, and a certificate proving the record existed at a point in time.
• The transport is stdio: the assistant launches the server as a subprocess on the same machine as the data.
• There is no network hop, no listening port, and no inbound surface to attac...
• It keeps a local catalog of everything it has archived: every project, every copy on tape, disk, NAS and cloud, every file path, every checksum, and every overnight job.

What to take from it

Where the server runs decides everything else The desktop server is a local process.

Details worth keeping

They speak the same protocol and share almost none of the same decisions. They fall out of the deployment model almost mechanically. Here is the comparison, decision by decision.