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 oborchers/fractional-cto --skill managed-services-over-self-hostedgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oborchers/fractional-ctoWrote 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/oborchers/fractional-cto/managed-services-over-self-hosted)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/managed-services-over-self-hosted"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/managed-services-over-self-hosted/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/oborchers/fractional-cto/managed-services-over-self-hosted"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/managed-services-over-self-hosted.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 | $0.00116 | $0.03173 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00058 | $0.01587 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00023 | $0.00635 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00317 |
Grade A, and why
managed-services-over-self-hosted 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 11d 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 — 241 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Every Self-Hosted Service Is a Person You Didn't Hire
Self-hosting a database, a cache, a workflow engine, or a Kubernetes cluster is not free. It costs patching, backup verification, incident response at 3 AM, capacity planning, version upgrades, security hardening, and monitoring of the monitor. Each self-hosted service is an invisible full-time job. For a team of five engineers shipping a SaaS product, running your own PostgreSQL is the equivalent of hiring a sixth engineer whose entire job is keeping PostgreSQL alive -- except you do not hire that person, so the work falls on everyone, and nobody does it well.
Managed services trade money for engineering time. For startups and small teams (under 50 engineers), this trade is almost always correct. The cloud bill goes up by hundreds of dollars per month; the engineering team gets back thousands of dollars in reclaimed time. Self-host only when the managed service genuinely cannot meet your requirements -- and document the justification in an ADR.
The Operations Tax
Every self-hosted service carries a recurring operations cost that is invisible until something breaks.
| Operations Task | Managed Service | Self-Hosted |
|---|---|---|
| OS/kernel patching | Provider handles it | You schedule downtime, test, apply |
| Version upgrades | One-click or automatic | You test, migrate, rollback-plan, execute |
| Backup & restore | Automated, point-in-time | You configure, verify, test restores quarterly |
| Scaling | Auto-scaling or single API call | You monitor, forecast, provision, rebalance |
| High availability | Built-in multi-AZ/region | You design, implement, test failover |
| Security hardening | Provider hardens, you configure | You harden OS, network, application, and runtime |
| Monitoring | Built-in metrics and logs | You deploy exporters, configure dashboards, set alerts |
| Incident response | Provider's SRE team + your config | Your team, 24/7, for infrastructure AND application |
| Compliance | Provider certifications (SOC2, HIPAA) | You certify the infrastructure yourself |
What ships with it
2 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.
- 11d ago First seen · 241 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A 9c130d96a5ef
managed-services-over-self-hosted is a skill published in the GitHub repository oborchers/fractional-cto (30 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 3,173 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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