competitive-scan

competitive-scan is a skill for Claude Code from stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills. It costs 68 tokens per session (1,079 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A competitor-research method that examines direct competitors, indirect substitutes, and non-software workarounds. It also asks why people have not adopted existing options for the same problem.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps research what is already available, compare existing ways of solving a problem, and identify adoption barriers.
Why use it?
It prevents a scan from becoming only a list of competing products and connects market findings to the actual user problem.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the discovery-phase plugin — 25 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps research what is already available, compare existing ways of solving a problem, and identify adoption barriers.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/competitive-scan
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 stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills --skill competitive-scan
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install discovery-phase, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 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 competitive-scan

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/competitive-scan/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/competitive-scan)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/competitive-scan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/competitive-scan/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 competitive-scan

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/competitive-scan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills/competitive-scan.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,079 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 $0.00068 $0.01079
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00540
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00216
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00108

Measured 12d ago against content hash c8bcbdb3bc61, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

competitive-scan 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 12d 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.

plugins/discovery-phase/skills/competitive-scan/SKILL.md · 86 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 86 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Competitive Scan

Part of the discovery-phase skill pack · evidence group · reads discovery-context.md (run profile-builder first if missing).

Answers two questions: what's already out there, and why haven't users adopted it for this problem? The second is more important.

Step 1 — Read inputs

Read discovery-context.md (sections 1. Client → Domain, 2. Product / Initiative) and problem-canvas.md (anchors the scan against the framed problem).

If discovery-context.md is missing, ask the BA inline: "client domain + product type in one line" — tag the output [ASSUMED DOMAIN]. If problem-canvas.md is missing, ask: "what problem in one line; what success signal would matter?" — tag the output [NO-PROBLEM-FRAME] so reviewers know the gap analysis is weak. Never block; recommend profile-builder / problem-framing for high-stakes work.

Step 2 — List competitive set in 3 layers

  1. Direct competitors — products explicitly solving the same problem in the same domain
  2. Indirect substitutes — adjacent products or workflows users already use (often surfaced by interviews / SME workshops)
  3. Adjacent (non-software) workarounds — Excel, manual ops, contractors, doing nothing

Aim for 4-8 entries across all 3 layers. More than 12 = over-research; fewer than 3 = the BA hasn't looked hard enough.

Step 3 — Delegate web research if available

If deep-research, market-research, or exa-search skills are installed:

"Use deep-research to produce a cited scan of tools that do <problem from canvas> for <user segment> in <domain>. Include pricing, last meaningful update, and notable user complaints."

Otherwise fall back to: G2/Capterra/Product Hunt for category, GitHub topic:<keyword> for OSS, Reddit + HN for complaints, vendor blogs for positioning (vs reality).

Step 4 — Score each entrant

Per entrant capture:

Field Notes
Name + URL
Layer direct / indirect / adjacent
Positioning (their words) from homepage / pitch
Real-world use (review/complaint signal) often differs from positioning
Pricing model including free tier
Last meaningful release stale tools = often opportunities
Key limitation for the client's user segment the why-not-this part
What it's great at be honest, not dismissive

Read the full file on GitHub · 86 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. 12d ago First seen · 86 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A c8bcbdb3bc61

Subscribe to this mod's changes

competitive-scan is a skill published in the GitHub repository stanislavnianko/product-discovery-claude-skills (1 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,079 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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