vendor-management

vendor-management is a skill for Claude Code from cbrock84/headcount. It costs 69 tokens per session (656 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for choosing, onboarding, monitoring, and eventually replacing suppliers and service providers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define vendor requirements, compare options, check references, test failure cases, manage performance, and plan an exit or migration.
Why use it?
It helps reveal risks that product demonstrations miss, such as poor support, weak finances, integration failures, or inability to handle your workload.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the operations plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to define vendor requirements, compare options, check references, test failure…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cbrock84/headcount/vendor-management
About the project

headcount is an organization of independently installable Claude Code plugins, each grouping skills for a department such as finance, security, or demand generation. Claude Code users install the departments they need and invoke their skills for specialized work; the catalogue entries are skills and related agent tooling from that organization.

cbrock84/headcount · 1,284 stars · on GitHub · cbrock84.github.io

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 cbrock84/headcount --skill vendor-management
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install operations, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 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 vendor-management

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/vendor-management.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/vendor-management)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/vendor-management"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/vendor-management.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 656 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 $0.00069 $0.00656
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00328
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00131
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00066

Measured 3d ago against content hash 552e4d94dd87, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vendor-management 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 3d 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/operations/skills/vendor-management/SKILL.md · 60 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 60 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vendor management

Define requirements before looking at options

Written before any demo: what the vendor must do, the volume and service level required, what must integrate with what, and the constraints that are genuinely non-negotiable.

Requirements written after seeing a product describe that product. This is the most common way selections are decided before they are run.

Separate must-have from nice-to-have and weight them in advance. Weighting after scoring is how a preferred vendor wins a process designed to be objective.

Evaluating

  • Reference checks with customers of your size and use case. A reference running a tenth of your volume tells you nothing about whether it scales.
  • Test the actual failure modes, not the demo path. What happens when data is malformed, volume spikes, or an integration times out?
  • Assess the vendor, not just the product — financial stability, roadmap direction, support responsiveness, and whether you are a meaningful customer to them. Being a rounding error to your critical supplier is a risk in itself.
  • Total cost including your side: implementation, integration, migration, training, and the ongoing effort to operate it. License cost is frequently the smaller half.

Terms that matter operationally

Beyond the legal review: service levels with real remedies, support response times by severity, data export in a usable format on demand, notice periods that give you time to migrate, and price protection at renewal. The absence of the last two is what makes exit expensive later.

Managing

  • One named owner on your side. Vendors without an internal owner drift and renew automatically.
  • Review on a schedule against the service levels, with evidence. Vendor-supplied performance reports mark their own work.
  • Log issues. At renewal, a documented pattern is leverage; a recollection is not.
  • Diarize renewals well before the notice deadline. Auto-renewal past an unnoticed deadline is the most common and most avoidable vendor loss.

Read the full file on GitHub · 60 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. 3d ago First seen · 60 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A 552e4d94dd87

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vendor-management is a skill published in the GitHub repository cbrock84/headcount (1,284 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 656 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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