vendor-evaluation

vendor-evaluation is a skill for Claude Code from rampstackco/claude-skills. It costs 99 tokens per session (2,497 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured way to compare and choose vendors, software services, infrastructure providers, or agencies. It covers requirements, scoring, formal requests for proposals, contracts, negotiations, and vendor risk.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for build-versus-buy decisions, vendor comparisons, RFPs, renewals, contract negotiations, and assessments of financial, security, or dependency risk.
Why use it?
It makes purchasing decisions easier to compare and defend. It helps expose hidden costs, integration limits, security concerns, and dependence on one provider.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the rampstack-skills plugin — 103 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it for build-versus-buy decisions, vendor comparisons, RFPs, renewals, contract negotiations, and assessments of financial, security, or dependency risk.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rampstackco/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation
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 rampstackco/claude-skills --skill vendor-evaluation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install rampstack-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 103 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-evaluation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rampstackco/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rampstackco/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rampstackco/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rampstackco/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 99 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,497 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00099 $0.02497
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.01248
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00499
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00250

Measured 4d ago against content hash 44b1e50b7f52, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vendor-evaluation 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 4d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/vendor-evaluation/SKILL.md · 287 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 287 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vendor Evaluation

Pick the right tool or service, negotiate fair terms, and avoid the lock-in traps. Stack-agnostic. Applies to SaaS, infrastructure providers, agencies, and any external dependency.


When to use

  • Selecting a tool or vendor for a new need
  • Evaluating alternatives to a current vendor
  • Build vs buy analysis
  • Renewal coming up: should we stay or switch?
  • Running a formal RFP or RFI
  • Comparing finalists in a vendor selection
  • Negotiating a contract
  • Assessing vendor risk (financial, security, dependency)

When NOT to use

  • General cost reduction (use cost-optimization)
  • Specific contract legal terms (those go to legal)
  • Performance issues with an existing vendor (try fixing before switching)
  • Hiring an agency for a one-off project (lighter framework needed)

Required inputs

  • The need (what problem are you solving, what would success look like)
  • Constraints (budget, timeline, integration requirements)
  • Stakeholders (users, IT, security, finance, legal)
  • Existing context (what's already used, what's been tried)
  • Compliance requirements

The framework: 5 phases

A structured vendor evaluation. Skip phases at your peril.

Phase 1: Define the need

Before looking at vendors, define what you actually need.

  • What problem are you solving?
  • What's the user / use case?
  • What does "success" look like in 6 months? In 2 years?
  • What's the budget (range, not just ceiling)?
  • What's the timeline?
  • Are there must-have integrations or constraints?

The temptation: skip this and start demoing. Vendors are happy to show off; you end up choosing what looks shiny rather than what fits.

Phase 2: Build vs buy

Before evaluating vendors, decide whether you should build instead.

Build when:

  • It's core to the business (differentiating)
  • The need is so specific no vendor matches
  • The economics work at your scale
  • You have the team to maintain it
  • Vendor lock-in would be unacceptable

Buy when:

  • It's table stakes (not differentiating)
  • The need is well-served by existing products
  • The economics favor it
  • The team should focus elsewhere
  • The vendor's specialization beats your generalism

Read the full file on GitHub · 287 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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.

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. 4d ago First seen · 287 lines · 99 tokens per session scan A 44b1e50b7f52

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vendor-evaluation is a skill published in the GitHub repository rampstackco/claude-skills (826 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 99 tokens to every session and 2,497 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 2026-09-03.

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