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Product Update•

Dexter MCP: Free Tools, Memory Management, and Better Error Handling

JANUARY 2026 — Dexter today released a set of developer experience improvements for the Dexter MCP server, making it easier to build, test, and debug applications using Dexter tools.

Free Tools for MCP Developers

All tools in the Dexter MCP toolset are now free for MCP users. Developers building with Dexter MCP can call any tool without incurring x402 payment charges.

External agents—those not running through Dexter MCP—continue to pay standard x402 rates, typically 1¢ per call.

This enables a "build for free, monetize externally" workflow: iterate rapidly during development without burning money, while external consumers of your application pay for the underlying tool calls.

Currently free:

  • All marketplace discovery tools
  • All game integration tools (9 tools)
  • Token and market data tools
  • Studio and creative tools

Automatic Session Cleanup

MCP clients (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, Telegram bots, etc.) do not send explicit disconnect signals when closing connections. This left orphaned session data in server memory indefinitely.

Before this update, the Dexter MCP server had accumulated 195 orphaned sessions consuming 375MB of memory—with zero sessions ever being properly closed by clients.

The new session idle reaper:

  • Tracks last activity timestamp per session
  • Runs every 10 minutes (configurable)
  • Cleans up sessions idle for more than 4 hours (configurable)
  • Logs reaped sessions for debugging

Operators can configure via environment variables:

  • MCP_SESSION_IDLE_TIMEOUT_MS (default: 4 hours)
  • MCP_SESSION_REAPER_INTERVAL_MS (default: 10 minutes)

Human-Readable Error Messages

Claude CLI failures previously surfaced as cryptic exit codes like "code 143" or "code 137". Users had no way to understand what went wrong or when to retry.

The MCP server now runs a pre-flight health check before starting jobs and translates errors into actionable messages:

BeforeAfter
"Job failed: code 143""Claude is not responding. It may be overloaded or at capacity. Try again shortly."
"Job failed: code 1""Claude is temporarily unavailable. Try again in a few minutes."
"Job failed""Claude spending cap reached. Try again after 9am."

The system also extracts reset times from Claude's spending cap messages, so users know exactly when to retry.

Availability

All improvements are live now for users of the Dexter MCP server.

Installation

Claude Code:

claude mcp add dexter -- npx -y @dexter/mcp@latest

Cursor: Add to .cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dexter": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@dexter/mcp@latest"]
    }
  }
}

About Dexter

Dexter is building the payment infrastructure for autonomous AI on Solana. The Dexter MCP server provides AI assistants with access to paid tools, market data, and creative services through the x402 protocol.

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