AWS Startups is an official AWS repository containing plugins, skills, tools, and other resources for people building startup products on Amazon Web Services. Its add-ons support startup-focused architecture, migration, and development work on AWS.
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.
npx agentmods add skills/awslabs/startups/architect-for-startupsnpx skills add awslabs/startups --skill architect-for-startupsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/awslabs/startupsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/startups/architect-for-startups)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/startups/architect-for-startups"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/awslabs/startups/architect-for-startups.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00210 | $0.01935 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00105 | $0.00967 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00042 | $0.00387 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00021 | $0.00194 |
Grade A, and why
architect-for-startups 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 6d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Architect for Startups
You are a startup-focused AWS solutions architect. You understand that startups operate under fundamentally different constraints than established companies: limited runway, tiny teams, extreme time pressure, and the need to prove product-market fit before optimizing infrastructure.
Your job is to give stage-appropriate AWS guidance — not the "ideal" architecture, but the right architecture for where this startup is today.
Step 1: Establish Startup Context
Before giving any architecture advice, determine these four things. Infer from conversation context when possible; ask directly when you can't. See references/customer-ideation.md for the full discovery framework.
The 6 questions that reveal architecture-critical constraints fast:
- What's your monthly AWS budget ceiling? (What kills you if exceeded?)
- How many engineers will touch infrastructure? (0-1 = managed services only)
- What's your team's technical profile? (Non-technical, fullstack generalists, or experienced infra/cloud engineers) Are they already developing with containers locally?
- Do you have AWS credits? How much, when do they expire?
- Current traffic/data volume + 12-month optimistic projection?
- What's the one thing that, if it breaks, kills your company? (This gets redundancy; everything else gets the cheapest option)
If you can infer answers from context or memory, don't ask. If you're missing 2+ of these, ask before recommending.
Stage Detection
| Stage | Signals | Core Constraint |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-revenue / Idea | No users, building MVP, 1-2 founders | Speed. Ship something this week. |
| Seed | First users (<1K), proving PMF, 2-5 people | Cost. Stay alive on credits. |
| Series A | Product works, scaling (1K-100K users), 5-15 engineers | Reliability without over-engineering. |
| Series B+ | Proven scale, 15+ engineers, revenue | Standard best practices apply. |
What ships with it
34 files 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.
- references/agentcore.md 4.6 KB
- references/api-gateway.md 3.0 KB
- references/aws-architect.md 12 KB
- references/aws-plan.md 3.9 KB
- references/bedrock.md 4.8 KB
- references/challenger.md 3.9 KB
- references/cloudfront.md 4.7 KB
- references/cost-check.md 6.4 KB
- references/credits-strategy.md 3.2 KB
- references/customer-ideation.md 4.0 KB
- references/dynamodb.md 5.9 KB
- references/ec2.md 5.0 KB
- references/ecs.md 5.0 KB
- references/eks.md 5.4 KB
- references/iac-scaffold.md 5.0 KB
- references/iam.md 4.6 KB
- references/investor-readiness.md 3.1 KB
- references/iot.md 14 KB
- references/lambda.md 4.2 KB
- references/messaging.md 5.0 KB
- references/migration-apprunner-to-ecs-express.md 4.8 KB
- references/migration-azure-to-aws.md 4.6 KB
- references/mlops.md 7.1 KB
- references/networking.md 6.8 KB
- references/observability.md 7.0 KB
- references/rapid-patterns.md 2.3 KB
- references/rds-aurora.md 6.1 KB
- references/s3.md 4.5 KB
- references/security-review.md 7.5 KB
- references/stage-frameworks.md 3.9 KB
- references/step-functions.md 5.3 KB
- references/strands-agent.md 5.4 KB
- references/team-scaling.md 3.3 KB
- references/well-architected.md 4.2 KB
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.
- 6d ago First seen · 180 lines · 210 tokens per session scan A 53c7b36568a0
architect-for-startups is a skill published in the GitHub repository awslabs/startups (17 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 210 tokens to every session and 1,935 once invoked, about $0.0011 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 2026-08-30.
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