vendor-evaluation

vendor-evaluation is a skill for Claude Code from sethdford/claude-skills. It costs 19 tokens per session (188 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured method for comparing and selecting vendors for infrastructure, software delivered as a service, or other services. It covers technical, business, support, and risk considerations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define requirements, compare vendors, review pricing and contracts, assess lock-in and stability, and check customer references.
Why use it?
It helps replace impression-based choices with a consistent comparison of cost, service commitments, security, support, and the difficulty of switching later.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the decision-making plugin — 8 skills, 3 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to define requirements, compare vendors, review pricing and contracts, assess lock-in and stability, and check customer references.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install decision-making, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 3 commands.

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/sethdford/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation/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 vendor-evaluation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sethdford/claude-skills/vendor-evaluation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 188 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 $0.00019 $0.00188
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00094
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00038
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00019

Measured 11d ago against content hash 73364f547abb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, 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 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.

architect/decision-making/skills/vendor-evaluation/SKILL.md · 26 lines

What it actually says

Vendor Evaluation

Evaluate vendors using structured criteria including cost, SLA, support, roadmap alignment, and lock-in risk.

Instructions

  1. Functional Requirements: What features must vendor provide?
  2. Non-Functional: Performance, scalability, security, compliance
  3. Business Terms: Pricing, contracts, SLA, support response times
  4. Risk Assessment: Vendor stability, lock-in, exit strategy
  5. References: Talk to existing customers

Anti-Patterns

  • Vendor Selection Without SLA: Pick based on marketing. Guard: Require written SLAs with penalties.
  • Ignoring Lock-In: "We're committed to vendor." Guard: Evaluate exit cost before committing.

Further Reading

  • Vendor Evaluation Frameworks
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. 11d ago First seen · 26 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A 73364f547abb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vendor-evaluation is a skill published in the GitHub repository sethdford/claude-skills (40 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 188 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories