cost-optimization

cost-optimization is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from arjunprabhulal/devops-skills. It costs 123 tokens per session (1,281 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to reducing cloud spending by finding the largest sources of waste first.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding idle and abandoned resources, checking eligibility for reserved or savings-plan discounts, sizing fleets, and ranking savings by dollar impact.
Why use it?
It helps teams avoid spending time on small savings while oversized, idle, or unnecessarily expensive resources drive most of the bill.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the devops-skills plugin — 56 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/arjunprabhulal/devops-skills/cost-optimization
Any agent
npx skills add arjunprabhulal/devops-skills --skill cost-optimization
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/arjunprabhulal/devops-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install devops-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 56 skills.

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 cost-optimization

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arjunprabhulal/devops-skills/cost-optimization.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/arjunprabhulal/devops-skills/cost-optimization)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arjunprabhulal/devops-skills/cost-optimization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arjunprabhulal/devops-skills/cost-optimization.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 123 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,281 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00123 $0.01281
Opus 5 $0.00062 $0.00641
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00256
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00128

Measured 4d ago against content hash 28a127f106b7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cost-optimization 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 4d 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.

skills/finops/cost-optimization/SKILL.md · 108 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 108 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cost Optimization

Cloud bills rarely have one villain — they have a long tail of small waste and a short list of big levers. Teams that start by auditing every line item burn weeks on savings measured in dollars, while the resource that's 40% of the bill sits untouched because nobody sorted by size first. Optimization is a prioritization problem before it's an engineering problem.

The other trap is treating cost cutting as a one-time project. Spend drifts every time someone ships a new service, forgets to delete a test environment, or a traffic pattern shifts enough to make last quarter's instance sizes wrong. A cost review that runs once and declares victory is already stale by the next billing cycle.

Find the biggest lever with data, pull it, then come back for the next one.

For a ranked catalog of savings levers and how to find candidates, read references/savings-levers.md.

1. Rank levers by dollar impact before touching anything

Sort the bill by service, then by resource, before deciding what to fix. A single oversized database instance can dwarf a dozen idle load balancers combined, and no amount of enthusiasm for cleaning up small things substitutes for finding the one thing that's actually expensive.

  • Pull the billing export or cost-explorer report first — don't optimize from memory of what "feels" expensive.
  • Work top-down — the top five line items usually explain most of the spend variance.
  • Ignore anything under a threshold that isn't worth an engineer's time — a $20/month savings is not worth a change-review cycle.

Done when: the top five cost drivers are known by name and dollar amount, not by guess.

2. Kill idle and orphaned resources first — they buy nothing

An idle resource — a stopped-but-not-deleted instance, an unattached volume, a load balancer with no healthy targets, a snapshot nobody restores from — delivers zero value at full price. Unlike rightsizing or commitment purchases, removing it carries no performance trade-off to weigh, which makes it the fastest win available.

Read the full file on GitHub · 108 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 4d ago First seen · 108 lines · 123 tokens per session scan A 28a127f106b7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cost-optimization is a skill published in the GitHub repository arjunprabhulal/devops-skills (2 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 123 tokens to every session and 1,281 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-31.

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