Why PageBolt MCP Burns Zero Tokens on Browser Execution

Every browser action a competing MCP takes costs you tokens. Not just the tool call — the DOM snapshot, the reasoning step, the retry when the selector missed, the confirmation screenshot. A single "navigate to this URL and extract the page structure" task can burn 2,000–5,000 tokens in a browser-use or Playwright MCP session before you get anything back. PageBolt MCP burns zero tokens on browser execution. One tool call. One result. Done. That's not a positioning claim — it's an architectural difference. Tools like browser-use and Playwright MCP expose browser primitives to the model: navigate, click, fill, screenshot, get_text. The model then orchestrates these into a task by calling them in sequence, reasoning between each step. A task like "inspect this page and return its interactive elements" might look like this in the model's context: Tool call: navigate(url="https://example.com") Tool result: Page loaded Tool call: screenshot() Tool result: [image data, ~800 tokens] Tool call: get_dom() Tool result: [full DOM HTML, ~2000 tokens] Tool call: find_elements(selector="button, input, a") Tool result: [partial list] Tool call: screenshot() # verify state Tool result: [image data, ~800 tokens]

That's 5 round-trips, ~4,000 tokens consumed, and the model is doing orchestration work the whole time — deciding what to call next, parsing results, handling failures. If a selector doesn't match, add another 2 round-trips. This isn't a flaw in these tools. It's the design: they give the model fine-grained browser control so it can handle arbitrary tasks. The cost is proportional to complexity. PageBolt exposes high-level operations. The browser runs entirely on PageBolt's infrastructure. The model calls one tool, the server executes the complete operation, and the result comes back as structured data or a file. The same "inspect this page" task: Tool call: inspect_page(url="https://example.com") Tool result: { "el