Google Maps (archived)

The Context Tax line on this page is empty, and that emptiness is the result worth reading. A server that will not complete initialize without credentials cannot be surveyed, so its tools/list weight is unknown to us and to anyone else who did not pay Google first. For scale, most booting servers in this batch land near a couple of thousand estimated tokens (chars/4), and the heaviest of them, Notion, is an order of magnitude past that. A maps wrapper with a handful of endpoint-shaped tools would sit under the batch median comfortably; the schemas are latitude, longitude, radius and a query string. Token cost is not the reason to avoid this one.

One environment variable, GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY, is the entire gate, and the harness found it the hard way: our probe runs every server with no secrets, so the process wrote the missing-variable message to stderr and quit. Transport is stdio over npx, no OAuth, no callback URL, no config file. The real work happens in the Google Cloud console, where the key needs the Geocoding, Places, Directions, Distance Matrix and Elevation APIs enabled individually and a billing account attached; a key that works for one of those returns permission errors for the rest, which surfaces as a confusing tool failure rather than a startup failure. Restrict the key by API, because it sits unencrypted in your client config.