council-estimate

council-estimate is a command for Claude Code from SteveGJones/ai-first-sdlc-practices. It costs 23 tokens per session (482 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A dry-run calculator for estimating the cost of a council assessment from selected models, evaluation dimensions, and fan-out count.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps budget multi-agent evaluations and identify models with free or unknown pricing entries.
Why use it?
It shows expected per-model and total cost before any agents are called.

Command for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: positional $N argument; mentions OpenCode.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the sdlc-model-council plugin — 1 skill, 7 commands, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit It helps budget multi-agent evaluations and identify models with free or unknown pricing entries.

Compare 6 commands from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add SteveGJones/ai-first-sdlc-practices
Claude Code
/plugin install sdlc-model-council

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sdlc-model-council, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 7 commands, 2 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for council-estimate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/stevegjones/ai-first-sdlc-practices/council-estimate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/stevegjones/ai-first-sdlc-practices/council-estimate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/stevegjones/ai-first-sdlc-practices/council-estimate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/stevegjones/ai-first-sdlc-practices/council-estimate/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for council-estimate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/stevegjones/ai-first-sdlc-practices/council-estimate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/stevegjones/ai-first-sdlc-practices/council-estimate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 23 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 482 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00023 $0.00482
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00241
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00096
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00048

Measured 10d ago against content hash ca730688ab25, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-13, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-estimate scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/sdlc-model-council/commands/council-estimate.md · 43 lines

What it actually says

Estimate what a council assessment would cost, without spending a single token. This is a dry run over pricing.json and the shipped stack — no extdel.sh handle is created, no adapter is called.

Arguments: $ARGUMENTS — parse models= (comma-separated model addresses, required), dims= (comma-separated dimensions, required), optional k= (fan-out multiplier per item, default 1).

Do this:

  1. Run:

    ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/council/estimate.py \
      --pricing ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/council/pricing.json \
      --stack ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/assessment/stack/v1/stack.json \
      --priors-dir ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/council/priors \
      --models <models> --dims <dims> [--k <k>]
    

    The per-model cost table prints to stderr; a JSON summary ({"per_model": …, "total_usd": …}) prints to stdout. Capture both.

  2. Present the table as-is — one row per model, then the total. Any model resolving to a free pricing family (e.g. opencode-free-tier) shows $0.00 — call that out explicitly so the user doesn't mistake it for a missing price.

  3. If a model address doesn't resolve to a known pricing family, estimate.py falls back to the zero-rated unknown family. Flag this plainly: an unknown-family estimate is "no cost data," not "no cost" — don't let it read as free.

  4. Close with: this is an estimate only, nothing was spent, and a real (paid) assessment run needs /sdlc-model-council:council-assess with an explicit budget-usd=.

Do not call assess.sh, extdel.sh, or any adapter from this command — estimation only.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 43 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A ca730688ab25

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-estimate is a command published in the GitHub repository SteveGJones/ai-first-sdlc-practices (41 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 482 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.