budget-estimator

budget-estimator is a skill for Claude Code from danielrosehill/Claude-AI-Video-Producer-Plugin. It costs 93 tokens per session (653 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning tool that estimates the API cost of generating one or more video pipelines before production starts. An API is a service that charges software for model calls, and the estimate includes likely retries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to produce low, typical, and high cost ranges from the storyboard, pipeline stages, selected models, shot durations, and expected number of takes.
Why use it?
It helps reveal expected spending per shot and for the whole script before any generation runs. It can use recent provider pricing and the project’s actual past iteration counts when available.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the ai-video-producer plugin — 11 skills, 11 commands, 7 agents, 3 MCP servers shipped together

Good fit Use it to produce low, typical, and high cost ranges from the storyboard, pipeline stages, selected models, shot durations, and expected number of takes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/danielrosehill/claude-ai-video-producer-plugin/budget-estimator
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 danielrosehill/Claude-AI-Video-Producer-Plugin --skill budget-estimator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danielrosehill/Claude-AI-Video-Producer-Plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-video-producer, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 11 commands, 7 agents, 3 MCP servers.

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 budget-estimator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielrosehill/claude-ai-video-producer-plugin/budget-estimator/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielrosehill/claude-ai-video-producer-plugin/budget-estimator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielrosehill/claude-ai-video-producer-plugin/budget-estimator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielrosehill/claude-ai-video-producer-plugin/budget-estimator/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 budget-estimator

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielrosehill/claude-ai-video-producer-plugin/budget-estimator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielrosehill/claude-ai-video-producer-plugin/budget-estimator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 653 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 $0.00093 $0.00653
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00327
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00131
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00065

Measured 12d ago against content hash b8803af02d65, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

budget-estimator 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 12d 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/budget-estimator/SKILL.md · 68 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Budget estimator

You produce realistic cost projections for an AI video project.

Inputs

  • Either a single pipeline (pipelines/<name>/SPEC.md) or all of them.
  • scripts/storyboards/ for shot count and durations.
  • brief/tools-and-models.md for model + provider per stage.
  • Latest pricing — pull from research/models-*.md if recent (≤30 days), otherwise re-fetch from provider pages.

Cost model

For each shot, for each pipeline stage:

  • Per-call cost — what one generation costs.
  • Iteration multiplier — how many takes the user typically runs to get an acceptable result. Defaults if no project history:
    • Text-to-image: ×3 (cheap, iterate freely)
    • Image-to-video: ×2 (expensive, iterate sparingly)
    • Text-to-video direct: ×3 (drifts; expect retries)
    • Voice: ×1.5
    • Lip-sync: ×1.5
    • Upscale / interpolate: ×1
  • Typical / low / high = (1 × per-call), (multiplier × per-call), (multiplier × 1.5 × per-call).

If logs/production-log.md has past data on this project, use the actual observed iteration count instead of defaults.

Output

budgets/estimate-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md:

# Cost estimate — <project name>
Date: <YYYY-MM-DD>
Pricing source: <date pulled, provider pages>

## Per-shot breakdown
| Shot | Pipeline | Stages | Low | Typical | High |
|------|----------|--------|-----|---------|------|

## Totals
- Low (everything first-take): $X.XX
- Typical: $Y.YY
- High (heavy iteration): $Z.ZZ

## Sensitivity
- Single biggest cost driver: <stage / model>
- Cheapest substitute that preserves quality: <if any>

## Assumptions
- <list: aspect, duration per shot, iteration multipliers used, currency>

After writing, summarise in 4-6 lines and flag if the typical figure exceeds the user's stated budget.

Discipline

  • Always show a range, never a single point estimate.
  • Always cite the date the prices came from. Surface explicitly that AI media pricing changes monthly.
  • Convert all prices to a single currency (default USD; user can override).
  • Don't include human time. This is API spend only.
  • If a stage's pricing model is "per second of output", multiply by the storyboard duration for that shot, not the wall-clock generation time.

Read the full file on GitHub · 68 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. 12d ago First seen · 68 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A b8803af02d65

Subscribe to this mod's changes

budget-estimator is a skill published in the GitHub repository danielrosehill/Claude-AI-Video-Producer-Plugin (4 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 653 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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