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 skills add ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocks --skill cost-managementgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocksWrote 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/ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocks/cost-management)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocks/cost-management"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocks/cost-management/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocks/cost-management"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocks/cost-management.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00179 | $0.03355 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00072 | $0.01342 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00036 | $0.00671 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00335 |
Grade A, and why
cost-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 17d 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 — 167 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Cost Management (watsonx Orchestrate)
This skill answers "what does this agent cost, why, and what would change it" for watsonx Orchestrate agents, from tokens to dollars, and ties every cost number to a quality number from the Agent Ops suite. Targets: SaaS (IBM Cloud or AWS hosted) and Developer Edition.
Stance: ask first, emit commands second, execute rarely. Bob auto-runs only fast, read-only diagnostics; everything that writes, configures, or calls an LLM is emitted for the user to run.
Validated against: ADK 2.18.0 on an IBM Cloud SaaS instance (trace fields observed 2026-10-02) with the loan-underwriting system from the Agent Ops building block. Statements marked observed come from those runs; the ADK docs and the provider's price list win if they disagree.
Two cost measures, say which one you mean:
- Model-inference cost — tokens × a per-token price. Comparable across designs, and the actual cost when the model is billed per token (watsonx.ai, or third-party providers through the model gateway). This is what the scripts compute.
- Invoice cost — what the customer pays. WXO SaaS plans meter usage by plan, not per token; confirm how the plan meters before quoting an invoice figure.
First action — one-line prereq notice, then a 3-question interview
Before we start: for tokens and dollars from platform traces I need the ADK (2.18+) with an activated
orchestrateenvironment on the instance; for Langfuse I need read access to the Langfuse project the instance exports to. Nothing gets configured on the instance unless you own it.
Expert escape hatch
If the opening message names a concrete action ("how much did yesterday's evaluation run cost", "register pricing for granite-4-h-small", "compare v1 and v2 cost per successful case"), skip the interview, name the module in one line, and run only its read-only diagnostics.
Interview
Q1 — Environment and ownership
Which instance, and do you own it? (a) SaaS on IBM Cloud · (b) SaaS on AWS · (c) Developer Edition · (d) on-premises Is the instance shared with other teams? (Decides whether the Langfuse integration may be touched at all.)
What ships with it
8 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.
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.
- 17d ago Changed · +6 tokens per session f33a8a4a05fc
- 19d ago First seen · 167 lines · 173 tokens per session scan A 7adfae1edc8d
cost-management is a skill published in the GitHub repository ibm-self-serve-assets/building-blocks (28 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 179 tokens to every session and 3,355 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-10-03.
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