Smithery is shutting down its hosted connection services today, Oct. 31, according to a notice on the company’s site. The shutdown takes out its MCP proxy and its managed identity service, and every Smithery-hosted server URL stops working the same day.
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a common way for AI apps to call outside tools such as a calendar or a code repository. A proxy sits between the app and those tool servers, so a developer connects to one address instead of many and lets the proxy handle logins.
The notice lists what stops working. That includes server addresses on run.tools and server.smithery.ai, the Smithery API, its Connect and Toolbox products, and Smithery accounts and API keys. The company’s command-line tool and software development kits will be marked as deprecated, which means they’ll stay available but won’t be maintained.
What survives
smithery.ai itself stays online as a public directory of MCP servers, which the notice says is “now powered by Arcade.dev.” It will no longer route traffic. For a curated set of verified servers, a listing will point to the vendor’s own address, such as mcp.linear.app/mcp, instead of a Smithery link like linear.run.tools.
The change follows Arcade.dev’s purchase of Smithery, which Arcade CEO Alex Salazar announced in a company blog post on Aug. 5. Salazar described Smithery as a public registry and hosting platform “built on the idea that finding and running an MCP server should take one click.” He said Smithery co-founder Anirudh Kamath was joining Arcade.
Neither company disclosed the price.
Arcade sells what it calls an actions runtime for enterprise agents, software that handles authorization and auditing when an agent calls a tool. Dealroom.co reported that Arcade raised a $60 million Series A in June, led by SYN Ventures with Morgan Stanley and Wipro taking part, which brought its total funding to $72 million.
In an Aug. 10 analysis for Forbes, contributor Janakiram MSV called it the first time a major MCP registry had been bought by a company that also runs the execution layer. He also raised questions about conflicts of interest and independent grading now that one vendor controls both the listing and the runtime. Arcade has said its own benchmark found that only 0.5% of the more than 43,400 MCP servers it indexed earned an A grade for tool quality, according to Dealroom.co’s summary of the deal.
What users have to do
Anyone using a server through Smithery should switch to the vendor’s official MCP URL, the notice says, and it adds that the official address is listed on each server’s page on smithery.ai. Developers who manage MCP connections for their own customers need a replacement service in place before the cutoff.
Kamath, who signs the notice as co-founder of Smithery, “now part of Arcade,” offers to help with migrations “even if it isn’t Arcade.” The notice also points people who want ready-made Gmail or Slack connectors to Arcade’s own products.
Smithery says it’s refunding every charge made since Aug. 5, the day the acquisition was announced, and canceling subscriptions so no one is billed again. It says refunds usually show up within 5 to 10 business days.
“Thank you for building with Smithery. It meant a lot to us,” Kamath wrote.
Source: Smithery, “The future of Smithery”
Additional sources: Arcade.dev blog, Alex Salazar, “Smithery Is Now Part of Arcade.dev”; Forbes, Janakiram MSV, “Arcade Acquires Smithery To Own The Agent Tool Supply Chain”; Dealroom.co, “Arcade acquires Smithery to control MCP registry and runtime layer”
