Building an MCP server so Claude can query my SaaS analytics directly

Last week I shipped a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for my analytics SaaS. Now Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any MCP compatible client can query traffic, revenue, and funnel data directly.

This is a walkthrough of how I built it, what worked, and a couple of patterns that surprised me.

What MCP is, briefly

MCP is a protocol that lets AI clients invoke tools and read resources from external servers. Think of it as REST for LLM tool calling, with a stable schema and discovery.

Server skeleton

import { Server } from '@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/index.js'

import { StdioServerTransport } from '@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/stdio.js'



const server = new Server({

  name: 'zenovay',

  version: '1.0.0',

}, {

  capabilities: {

    tools: {},

    resources: {}

  }

})

Defining tools

server.setRequestHandler('tools/list', async () => ({

  tools: [

    {

      name: 'get_traffic',

      description: 'Get pageview and visitor counts for a site over a date range',

      inputSchema: {

        type: 'object',

        properties: {

          site: { type: 'string' },

          from: { type: 'string' },

          to: { type: 'string' }

        },

        required: ['site', 'from', 'to']

      }

    }

  ]

}))

The pattern that surprised me: structured returns

Way better than raw JSON: return a short natural language summary plus the data. Claude uses the summary for its response and the JSON for follow up questions.

What I did not expect

Users started asking Claude to do things I had not built dashboards for:

• "Compare my paid traffic conversion rate this week vs last week"


• "Which 5 pages had the biggest week over week drop in pageviews"


• "Summarize what changed in my funnel completion rate over the last 30 days"

Claude does this by chaining multiple tool calls. I did not need to build any of those views. The tools are atomic, Claude composes.

This is the part I think is genuinely new about MCP. The interface is the LLM, the backend is just well shaped tools.

Install

npm install -g @zenovay/mcp then add to your Claude Desktop config.

Site: zenovay.com

Open source MCP server work happening here too? Curious what patterns others have found.

Valerio