cost-model

cost-model is a skill for Claude Code from avelikiy/great_cto. It costs 59 tokens per session (1,467 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A cost-estimation framework for coding-agent plans that records language-model usage, infrastructure changes, human-equivalent effort, and delivery time in a fixed format.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when preparing plans or architecture documents that need comparable estimates for model calls, people’s time, infrastructure, and time to ship.
Why use it?
Cost claims are easy to make but difficult to audit when their assumptions are unclear. The framework makes each estimate and its reasoning visible and machine-readable.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the great-cto plugin — 40 skills, 44 commands, 70 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when preparing plans or architecture documents that need comparable estimates for model calls, people’s time, infrastructure, and time to ship.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/avelikiy/great_cto/cost-model
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.

Any agent
npx skills add avelikiy/great_cto --skill cost-model
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/avelikiy/great_cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install great-cto, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 40 skills, 44 commands, 70 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 cost-model

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/cost-model/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/cost-model)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/cost-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/cost-model/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 cost-model

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/cost-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avelikiy/great_cto/cost-model.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,467 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00059 $0.01467
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00733
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00293
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00147

Measured 7d ago against content hash e08f05349aa0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cost-model 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 7d 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/cost-model/SKILL.md · 159 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 159 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cost model — make cost claims defensible

great_cto reports cost numbers on the board. Those numbers MUST be auditable, because a wrong "7,638×" claim killed credibility (see docs/blog/cost-dashboard-rebuild.md). This skill defines the format.

The 4-line cost section

Every PLAN-.md and ARCH-.md cost section follows this exact template:

## Cost estimate

**LLM**: $<low>–<high> (<N> calls × $<per-call avg>)
**Human equiv**: $<low>–<high> (<hours> × $<rate>/h)
**Infra delta**: $<low>–<high>/month
**Time to ship**: <hours> agent-time, <hours> wall-clock

> Methodology: <one-sentence rationale for each range>

Why this exact format?

The board's getCostHistory() parser anchors on line-start "LLM" and "Human" labels. Mid-line references are ignored to prevent the $240-trap regression. Stick to the template.

How to estimate each line

LLM cost

For each agent in the pipeline, estimate:

  • Prompt tokens = (system prompt size) + (context the agent receives)
  • Completion tokens = (typical output for that agent type)

Quick reference for Sonnet 4 ($3/M in, $15/M out):

Agent Typical prompt Typical output Per-call cost
architect 14k 1.5k ~$0.06
pm 6k 0.6k ~$0.03
senior-dev 8k 0.8k ~$0.04
qa-engineer 11k 0.5k ~$0.04
reviewer (avg) 8-12k 0.6k ~$0.04
security-officer 12k 1k ~$0.05
devops 9k 0.8k ~$0.04

For Haiku ($0.80/M / $4/M), divide by ~4. For Opus 4 ($15/M / $75/M), multiply by ~5.

Sum across the pipeline stages that actually fire (use gatesFor() and reviewersFor() from archetypes.ts to know the count).

Human equiv

The human cost to do the SAME work without agents. This is the "if I hired a senior engineer, how long would this task take, at what rate?"

  • Senior engineer: $120-180/hour (mid-market US/EU)
  • Staff engineer / specialist: $200-300/hour
  • Domain expert (security, compliance): $250-400/hour

Estimate hours conservatively. A "small feature" the LLM does in 15 minutes might take a human 2-4 hours (it's never just the typing).

Read the full file on GitHub · 159 lines

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. 7d ago First seen · 159 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A e08f05349aa0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cost-model is a skill published in the GitHub repository avelikiy/great_cto (92 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,467 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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