trigger-cost-savings

A cost-audit guide for Trigger.dev, a service that runs background tasks and scheduled jobs. It reviews code and, when connected, details from real task runs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review Trigger.dev task costs, machine sizes, run duration, schedules, retries, queues, and concurrency, then produce cost-saving recommendations.
Why use it?
It helps find unnecessary spending caused by oversized machines, inefficient tasks, long runs, or unsuitable schedules. Without live access, it reports only what can be learned from the source code.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/trigger-cost-savings
Any agent
npx skills add triggerdotdev/trigger.dev --skill trigger-cost-savings
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 583 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00068 $0.00583
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00292
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00117
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00058

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3c5b38eaf140, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

trigger-cost-savings 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 2d 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.

packages/cli-v3/skills/trigger-cost-savings/SKILL.md · 36 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 36 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Trigger.dev Cost Savings Analysis

The full, version-pinned cost-audit workflow ships inside your installed @trigger.dev/sdk. Read it before giving recommendations so they match the SDK version in this project:

  • Skill: node_modules/@trigger.dev/sdk/skills/trigger-cost-savings/SKILL.md — the static-analysis checklist, the MCP run-analysis steps (list_runs, get_run_details, get_current_worker), the report format, and the machine-preset cost table.
  • Docs: the canonical guidance is bundled at node_modules/@trigger.dev/sdk/docs/how-to-reduce-your-spend.mdx, with supporting pages under node_modules/@trigger.dev/sdk/docs/ (machines.mdx, runs/max-duration.mdx, queue-concurrency.mdx, idempotency.mdx, triggering.mdx, errors-retrying.mdx).

If those paths don't exist, @trigger.dev/sdk isn't installed yet — install it first. In a non-hoisted layout, resolve the package with node -p "require.resolve('@trigger.dev/sdk/package.json')" and read skills/ + docs/ beside it.

Live run analysis needs the Trigger.dev MCP server (npx trigger.dev@latest install-mcp). Without it, do the static source analysis only — never fabricate run data.

Key principles

  • Waits > 5 seconds are free — checkpointed, no compute charge.
  • Start small, scale up — the default small-1x is right for most tasks; right-size down tasks stuck on large-* with short durations.
  • I/O-bound tasks don't need big machines — API calls and DB queries wait on the network.
  • Add maxDuration — cap runaway compute.
  • Debounce high-frequency triggers — consolidate bursts into single runs.
  • Idempotency keys prevent duplicate billed work.
  • AbortTaskRunError stops wasteful retries — don't pay to retry permanent failures.

References

Sibling skills: trigger-authoring-tasks (the task options these levers tune: machine, maxDuration, retry, queue, idempotency), trigger-realtime-and-frontend, trigger-authoring-chat-agent and trigger-chat-agent-advanced (AI agents).

Read the full file on GitHub · 36 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 36 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 3c5b38eaf140

Subscribe to this mod's changes

trigger-cost-savings is a skill published in the GitHub repository triggerdotdev/trigger.dev (16,165 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 583 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

workflow

Creates durable, resumable workflows using Vercel's Workflow SDK. Use when building workflows that need to survive restarts, pause for external events, retry on failure, or coordinate multi-step operations over time. Triggers on mentions of "workflow", "durable functions", "resumable", "workflow sdk", "queue"…

vercel/workflow · 84 tokens

migrating-workflow-v4-to-v5

Upgrades an app from Workflow SDK 4.x to 5.0. Use when bumping the workflow / @workflow/ dependencies to v5, or when hitting removed v4 APIs — runStep, stepEntrypoint, workflow/internal/private, @workflow/core/private, writeToStream / closeStream / readFromStream on a World, world.steps.get without a runId…

vercel/workflow · 161 tokens

migrating-world-v4-to-v5

Upgrades a custom Workflow SDK World implementation from the v4 spec to v5. Use when a package implements the World interface from @workflow/world and is moving to 5.x — event IDs that are ULIDs rather than slot positions, Event id is not slot-numbered at replay time, a specVersion the runtime refuses, writeToStream /…

vercel/workflow · 166 tokens

migrating-to-workflow-sdk

Migrates Temporal, Inngest, Trigger.dev, and AWS Step Functions workflows to the Workflow SDK. Use when porting Activities, Workers, Signals, step.run(), step.waitForEvent(), Trigger.dev tasks / wait.forToken / triggerAndWait, ASL JSON state machines, Task/Choice/Wait/Parallel states, task tokens, or child workflows.

vercel/workflow · 81 tokens

workflow-init

Install and configure Vercel Workflow SDK before it exists in nodemodules. Use when the user asks to "install workflow", "set up workflow", "add durable workflows", "configure workflow sdk", or "init workflow" for Next.js, Express, Hono, Fastify, NestJS, Nitro, Nuxt, Astro, SvelteKit, or Vite.

vercel/workflow · 78 tokens

internal-dev-workbench

Spin up a portless + tmux dev session for the Workflow SDK that gives each git worktree isolated . .localhost URLs for the Next.js workbench and the observability UI, plus a Claude statusline that surfaces those URLs. Use only when the user asks for a "portless dev session", a "tmux dev layout for workflow"…

vercel/workflow · 122 tokens