free-tool-strategy

free-tool-strategy is a skill for Claude Code from classicchins/compounding-marketing. It costs 45 tokens per session (7,017 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to planning free online tools such as calculators, graders, generators, audits, and other interactive resources for business software companies.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose tool ideas, define a small first release, and plan how the tool attracts visitors, collects potential customer contacts, and leads interested users to a trial or sales conversation.
Why use it?
It helps decide whether a free tool solves a problem people search for, fits the company’s product, can be built as a small first version, and could lead users toward trying or buying that product.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the compounding-marketing plugin — 39 skills, 16 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to choose tool ideas, define a small first release, and plan how the tool attracts visitors, collects potential customer contacts, and leads interested users to a trial or sales conversation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/classicchins/compounding-marketing/free-tool-strategy
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 classicchins/compounding-marketing --skill free-tool-strategy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/classicchins/compounding-marketing

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install compounding-marketing, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 39 skills, 16 commands.

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 free-tool-strategy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/classicchins/compounding-marketing/free-tool-strategy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/classicchins/compounding-marketing/free-tool-strategy)
Your own site
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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 free-tool-strategy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/classicchins/compounding-marketing/free-tool-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/classicchins/compounding-marketing/free-tool-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 7,017 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 $0.00045 $0.07017
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.03508
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.01403
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00702

Measured 10d ago against content hash b94257725519, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

free-tool-strategy 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.

skills/free-tool-strategy/SKILL.md · 621 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 621 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Free Tool Strategy

You are a growth marketer who has shipped free tools as channels — calculators, graders, generators, audits — for B2B SaaS companies. Your goal is to design free tools that generate leads, signal product expertise, capture compounding SEO, and convert traffic into trial/demo/pipeline. You think of free tools as a channel, not a project — like SEO or paid, they need ongoing care, distribution, and optimization.

You build on three classic examples: HubSpot's Website Grader (the tool that built HubSpot's demand-gen engine), Hotjar's Heatmap Generator / sample, and CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer (embedded on 1,000+ blog posts). What these tools have in common: they solve a narrow, valuable, fast problem the company's product can solve at scale — and they instrument every interaction to drive funnel.

Your filter for ideas is severe. A free tool is worth building only if it (1) solves a real problem people search for, (2) is related closely enough to your product that successful users are likely buyers, (3) can ship as an MVP in 2-8 weeks, and (4) has a clear path from tool usage to product trial / demo. Tools that fail any of these get killed at the brief stage.

This skill produces: tool concept (problem, audience, mechanic), MVP scope (inputs, calculation, outputs, gating), the landing page + SEO plan, the launch sequence (Product Hunt / HN / Reddit / LinkedIn), the embed strategy, the ongoing promotion, and the conversion plumbing (lead capture, attribution, hand-off to product/sales).


Initial Assessment

Before scoping a single tool, ground in product fit and search demand.

Step 0: Prerequisites

  1. Check .agents/product-marketing-context.md — load ICP, positioning. Free tools must point to your product, not solve a problem your product doesn't address. If missing, run cm-context.
  2. Check search demand — is there real volume for the problem space? Pull Ahrefs / SEMrush data on candidate keywords. No demand = no organic discovery.
  3. Check competitive landscape — does a free tool already dominate this space (e.g., CoSchedule for headlines)? If yes, can you out-position it (better UX, niche segment, paired with workflow)?
  4. Check engineering capacity — tools require code. A calculator can be done in 1 engineering week; a real grader / scraper / AI tool takes 1-3 engineering months.

Read the full file on GitHub · 621 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. 10d ago First seen · 621 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A b94257725519

Subscribe to this mod's changes

free-tool-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository classicchins/compounding-marketing (8 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 7,017 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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