Lanes Link

Lanes Link is an open-source, self-hostable MCP (Model Context Protocol) server built by Lanes that gives every AI agent you use a single, governed endpoint to your accounts, memory, tasks, files, and secrets. Licensed under Apache-2.0, it runs on your machine, in your own cloud, or on Lanes Managed Cloud using the same codebase. The project reached v0.16.0 in September 2026 and is actively developed in the open at github.com/lanes-sh/link.

What It Is

Lanes Link sits between your AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, and anything else that speaks MCP) and the accounts and context those agents need. Instead of wiring each agent directly to each service — creating a tangle of per-agent integrations and re-authorisations — you connect your accounts once to Lanes Link and expose them through Access Profiles that define exactly what each agent or team member may reach. The endpoint enforces permissions at dispatch time rather than relying on the model to behave, so a rule like gmail.search = allow with gmail.send = deny holds regardless of what the agent was instructed.

How Access Profiles Work

Access Profiles are the core governance primitive. Each profile declares which connections, memory stores, skills, and vault entries it may use, and which members (human or agent identities) may invoke it. Key design decisions documented in the project:

• Deny by default, enforced at dispatch — nothing is reachable until explicitly allowed.
• Credentials never reach the agent — the agent gets results, not tokens.
• Append-only audit log — every call, allowed or refused, is recorded.
• Work and personal never mix — separate profiles, separate credential stores; an account not granted to a profile is not listed at all, so an agent never learns it exists.

What You Keep in It

The project distinguishes between what an agent gets and what belongs to the user. Eight categories of user-owned material live in the endpoint:

• Connections — external accounts (mail, calendar, files, issues) via lanes link connect
• Memory — facts to remember between sessions, stored as plain Markdown
• Tasks — to-do items with statuses, shared across agents
• Assets — named files, readable by both a text editor and an agent
• Skills — user-written procedures handed to agents as instructions
• Identity — who you are, so an agent signs off as you
• Entities — people and companies for lookup, not recall
• Vault — passwords and API keys released only where allowed

The project supports over 100 providers including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Atlassian, Stripe, Sentry, HubSpot, Vercel, Supabase, and many more.

Context Efficiency: The "Crunched" Surface

The README notes a concrete tradeoff: connecting many accounts produces hundreds of MCP tools, and describing all of them to an agent before it reads a single user message consumes context. The project measured one two-profile endpoint at 278 tools and roughly 180,000 tokens. A surface: crunched mode in profile.yaml replaces the full tool list with a search tool and a call tool; the agent asks for what it needs and receives only the matching capabilities. The README states this drops the same endpoint to 28 tools and about 8,000 tokens with no change to permissions or reachability.

Deployment Model

Lanes Link runs in three configurations using the same open-source code:

• Local — lanes link start on your machine, requires Bun 1.3.11+
• Self-hosted — lanes link deploy to your own GCP project on Cloud Run
• Lanes Managed Cloud — managed hosting (listed as coming soon as of the latest sources)

The self-hosted path is the recommended option when the endpoint needs to be reachable from mobile clients or cloud-based AI services like claude.ai or ChatGPT. Requests go from the user's machine directly to the provider; Lanes servers are not in the data path for account content.

Update: v0.16.0 and Desktop Integration

The latest GitHub release is v0.16.0, published 11 September 2026. Recent blog posts from the Lanes team document active weekly shipping: v0.49 of the broader Lanes platform added Astra model support and improved Codex integration (8 September 2026), v0.48 added dictation and a lighter app (5 September 2026), and a 27 August 2026 post announced that Lanes Link is now available inside the Lanes Desktop app with no terminal required. The project is written in TypeScript and the default branch is develop.