capacity-cost-model

capacity-cost-model is a skill for Claude Code from sananthanarayan/skilldrop. It costs 120 tokens per session (1,737 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning skill that estimates the computing resources and running cost needed for a service as demand grows. It uses measures such as requests, users, stored data, or events rather than starting with a fixed server count.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to estimate cost per request, user, event, or gigabyte; compare average and peak demand; decide on spare capacity; and identify when scaling becomes much more expensive.
Why use it?
It helps avoid paying for idle capacity or running out of capacity during busy periods. It also exposes costs that are often missed, such as data transfer, and shows how costs change at different growth levels.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the skilldrop plugin — 51 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to estimate cost per request, user, event, or gigabyte; compare average and peak demand; decide on spare capacity; and identify when scaling becomes much more expensive.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sananthanarayan/skilldrop/capacity-cost-model
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 sananthanarayan/skilldrop --skill capacity-cost-model
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sananthanarayan/skilldrop

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skilldrop, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 51 skills, 4 agents.

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 capacity-cost-model

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sananthanarayan/skilldrop/capacity-cost-model.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sananthanarayan/skilldrop/capacity-cost-model)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sananthanarayan/skilldrop/capacity-cost-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sananthanarayan/skilldrop/capacity-cost-model.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 120 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,737 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 $0.00120 $0.01737
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00869
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00347
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00174

Measured 7d ago against content hash c135313d3c42, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

capacity-cost-model 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 7d 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/capacity-cost-model/SKILL.md · 65 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

capacity-cost-model

Turns "how much will this cost to run?" into a model a reviewer can re-run and finance can trust — sized from demand, expressed in cost per unit, and honest about the line items everyone forgets until the invoice. Distinct from business-case (which decides whether to invest, across options) and nfr-spec (which sets the throughput/availability targets); this models the resources and dollars to meet a target you've already chosen.

How to respond

  1. Start from the demand model, never from instance types. The first question is "how much of what?" — the driver (requests/sec, tenants, GB stored, events/day, concurrent users), its current value, its growth curve, and the peak-to-average ratio. Ask at most 2 questions, spent on the driver's current volume + source and the peak ratio (the spikiness that decides static-vs-autoscale). Sizing to a round instance count instead of to demand is how clusters end up 80% idle or 200% over.

  2. Express everything as unit economics. Cost per request / per tenant / per 1k events / per GB-month — because that's what scales predictably, what finance budgets in, and what reveals whether the architecture gets cheaper or more expensive per unit as it grows. ✅ "$0.012 per active tenant per day, dominated by the per-tenant search index" — ❌ "about $4k/month" (a number with no denominator can't be reasoned about at 10×).

  3. Model the components against the cost catalog (reference.md) — compute, storage, network egress (the forgotten heavyweight), managed-service tiers, logging/observability (routinely a top-3 surprise), backups/DR, data transfer cross-AZ/region, and non-production environments (dev/staging/idle often 30–50% of the bill). Each line: the quantity from the demand model × the unit price, with the price's source/date tagged. Missing the egress and observability lines is the single most common way a model lands 40% low.

  4. Make peak-vs-average and headroom explicit decisions, not defaults. State both the average load (what you bill for) and the peak (what you must serve), and the chosen target utilization + buffer with its reasoning: ✅ "size to peak × 1.3 for failover + spike; accept ~55% average utilization because the spike is revenue-critical". Over-provisioning burns money; under-provisioning is an incident — the headroom number is where that tradeoff is decided, so it's named, not buried in a rounded-up instance count.

Read the full file on GitHub · 65 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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.

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. 7d ago First seen · 65 lines · 120 tokens per session scan A c135313d3c42

Subscribe to this mod's changes

capacity-cost-model is a skill published in the GitHub repository sananthanarayan/skilldrop (2 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 120 tokens to every session and 1,737 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 2026-08-31.