MCP Connectors in Aikeedo: Let Chat Use Your Users’ Other Services

A chat assistant that knows everything about the world and nothing about your user's own work only gets you so far. The question we kept hearing was a simple one: can the AI look at my Notion, my issues, my errors, my data?

In v5.1 the answer is yes. Connectors let the AI use tools from other services in the middle of a conversation — search a Notion workspace, look up a Linear issue, read a Sentry error, or call your own internal API — while your users stay in control of what it is allowed to do.

This is the biggest feature in the release, and this post covers what it is, how you run it as an operator, what your subscribers see, and where the limits are.

What Connectors Are

Connectors are built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that Claude and ChatGPT use for the same purpose. A service publishes an MCP server, and any app that speaks MCP can use the tools it offers. That means any remote MCP server works in Aikeedo, and the list of services grows without us writing an integration for each one.

We call them connectors, as Claude does, because that is what users understand. A user connects a service, and from then on the AI can use it in any of their chats — with or without one of your Assistants, and on any model that supports tool calling.

Two ideas shape the whole design:

• Every user signs in with their own account. The AI acts with that user's access, never someone else's.
• The user decides what the AI may do. Every tool has a permission, and the default is to ask.

The Subscriber Experience

Your subscribers manage connectors under Settings → Connectors, which has a Yours tab for what they have connected and a Discover tab for connectors you have made available.

Connecting

Clicking Connect signs the user in to the service — most use OAuth — and then lists the tools the server offers. Tools are grouped by what the server says they do: read-only tools, write and delete tools, other tools, and tools that cannot be used here along with the reason why.

Setting permissions

Every tool can be set to Always allow, Needs approval or Never allow, one at a time or for a whole group at once. Every tool starts at Needs approval, including the ones a server calls read-only. A server describes its own tools, and a server can get that description wrong or worse. We would rather ask once too often than let a destructive tool run because it was labelled harmless.

Approving in the conversation

When the AI wants to use a tool that needs approval, the chat pauses and shows a card with the tool's name and exactly what it is about to send. The user chooses:

• Allow once — run it this time.
• Always allow — run it, and do not ask again for this tool.
• Deny — the AI is told the request was declined.

Closing the card declines the request and lets the user reply in their own words. Nothing hangs, and nothing runs without a decision.

Adding a custom connector

When the plan allows it, any workspace member can add a server of their own. They paste its address, and a three-step flow takes over: it names the connector, checks the server live — reporting each step as it goes, such as connecting, finding the sign-in settings and checking the provider — and then lets the user confirm how it signs in. If the user's choice contradicts what the check found, they see a warning.

Custom connectors belong to the workspace, and each member connects with their own account. This is the route for your own APIs and for any MCP server that is not in a catalogue.

The Operator Perspective

Connectors are off by default, and three switches must all be on before a user sees them.

1. The feature. Turn on Connectors under Settings → Features → Chat.
2. The plan. Turn on Connectors in a plan's capabilities, then choose what it includes:
   • Library → Connectors — which catalogue connectors the plan gets, or All connectors to include every active one, including those you add later.
   • Quota → Custom connectors cap — how many servers a workspace can add itself. Leave it blank for unlimited, or set it to 0 to disallow custom connectors.
3. The user. Users can turn connectors off for themselves under Capabilities, like any other chat capability.

This gives you a straightforward way to build plans around connectors. Offer a handful of curated services on an entry plan, the full catalogue on a higher one, and custom servers only where you are comfortable with them.

Operators also manage connectors in the admin panel: add a server by address, let Aikeedo check it, choose how users sign in, declare request headers such as an API key, and see the tools it offers. You can test a connector, refresh its tools on demand, and switch it off without deleting it.

Credits

There is no credit charge for connector calls. They are requests against the user's own account with the service, and the cost that matters — the model's tokens — is already metered. One thing to keep in mind: every tool offered to the model adds its description to the request, so connecting servers with a lot of tools makes each message larger. Aikeedo limits how many tools it offers per connector and per request, and picks the ones relevant to what the user is asking.

Connector Catalogue: 487 Servers, Ready to Import

You can add servers by hand, but you should not have to. The new Connector Catalogue plugin ships 487 vetted MCP servers from official vendors, in 14 categories: code, productivity, data, sales and marketing, commerce, finance, communication, design, media, travel, education, legal, health and more.

• 66 are hand-verified and carry a verified tick.
• Setup is mostly automatic. 329 use OAuth, 133 need no sign-in and 25 ask for sign-in only when a tool is called.
• Import what you want under Settings → Starter content → Connectors, with logos, search and a category filter. Imports are ordinary connectors: edit them, switch them off or delete them.
• The catalogue never imports itself. It is not part of "Import everything" in the admin panel, the installer or the command line, so nothing appears on your platform until you choose it.

Only first-party servers are included: each one has a namespace verified against the vendor's own domain, runs over HTTPS and was reachable when we built the catalogue. It is available in the marketplace, requires Aikeedo 5.1 or later, and you can add connectors yourself without it.

Security, Because It Matters Here

A connector receives whatever the AI sends it, and its tools act on a real account. We treated that seriously.

• Approval by default. Every tool asks before it runs, and the card shows exactly what will be sent.
• Third-party text is data. Tool descriptions and results come from outside your platform. Aikeedo marks them to the model as data rather than instructions and strips hidden characters. This lowers the risk of prompt injection, but nothing removes it entirely, which is why the approval default exists.
• Encrypted credentials. Tokens and header values are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, using a key in your .env file, and are never sent back to the browser. Back the key up with your database: without it, every user has to reconnect.
• A guard on URLs. Connector addresses must be public HTTPS URLs. Addresses that point to localhost, private networks or cloud metadata endpoints are refused, including through redirects. The same guard now protects web pages read during chat and dataset URLs.
• Limits. Tools offered per request are budgeted, so one large server cannot take over a conversation.

What Connectors Do Not Do

• Remote servers only. Connectors work with remote MCP servers over HTTPS. Servers that run as a local command are not supported, and neither is a server on the same machine or network as Aikeedo, because of the URL guard.
• Tools only. MCP also defines resources and prompts. We support tools for now.
• Cron helps. A cron job refreshes each connection's tool list every few hours and keeps sign-ins from expiring. Connectors work without it, but tool lists then change only when a user presses Refresh tools.

Getting Started

Update to v5.1, then:

1. Make sure APP_ENCRYPTION_KEY is set. Updates write it for you; if the file is not writable, run php bin/console app:generate-key.
2. Turn on Connectors under Settings → Features → Chat.
3. Add a few connectors yourself, or install the Connector Catalogue and import the ones you want.
4. Enable them on your plans.

The Connectors documentation has the details, and the v5.1 release post covers everything else that is new.

Try the live demo to see it in action, or head to our pricing page if you are ready to get started.