lower-anthropic-bill

lower-anthropic-bill is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools. It costs 0 tokens per session (1,547 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A local audit for finding ways to reduce spending on Claude or the Anthropic API, such as missed prompt-cache opportunities, batch processing, or alternative model routes. The Anthropic API is a service applications use to send prompts to Claude and receive answers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review Claude call sites, check cache and token-counting risks, assess batchability, and compare possible routes to OpenAI or a local model.
Why use it?
It identifies likely cost issues before any code is changed or provider test calls are made. The audit can inspect the codebase and local usage exports without uploading private material.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the understudy plugin — 43 skills, 1 command shipped together

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/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/lower-anthropic-bill
Any agent
npx skills add understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools --skill lower-anthropic-bill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install understudy, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 43 skills, 1 command.

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 lower-anthropic-bill

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/lower-anthropic-bill.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/lower-anthropic-bill)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/lower-anthropic-bill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/lower-anthropic-bill.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,547 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 5.1 $0.00000 $0.01547
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00773
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00309
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00155

Measured 5d ago against content hash afd50db24654, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lower-anthropic-bill 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 5d 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/lower-anthropic-bill/SKILL.md · 127 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 127 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Lower Anthropic Bill

Use this worker for the installer happy path and for any developer who arrives with a Claude bill, Anthropic usage export, or codebase that calls the Messages API. The first deliverable is a local audit: call-site inventory, current price assumptions, tokenizer re-baseline risk, cache-hit opportunities, batchability, and route candidates. Do not edit code during the audit.

Safety Gates

  • Local-first. Static repo inspection and local usage-export parsing are the default. Do not upload source, prompts, traces, completions, datasets, repo paths, secrets, or private notes without explicit approval for that exact action.
  • No provider spend without a named surface, model, data class, row count, and dollar envelope. Token-counting, cache probes, OpenAI migration tests, and GEPA reflection all need approval if they call a provider. Recommend the decision-sized test and explain its expected savings, time, and confidence; one approval may cover the named bounded test matrix.
  • No silent source edits. Adding cache_control, changing model strings, rewriting prompts, or adding an OpenAI route is a follow-up change after the audit report is reviewed.
  • Treat dollar values as estimates until backed by usage exports or measured runs. Savings claims require the normal claim.json evidence path from ../optimize-workload/SKILL.md.

Intake

Default to the current repo. Ask for at most one missing input:

  • a path to the app or service that calls Anthropic;
  • an Anthropic usage export, gateway capture directory, or sampled response usage block;
  • monthly call volume per route if no export exists.

If the installer prompt set the lower-Anthropic-bill goal, assume the objective is cost reduction with no quality regression. Ask only for the target repo or usage export if you cannot infer it.

If the developer asks to inspect billing email, invoices, receipts, or an authenticated billing website, route that optional evidence source through ../inspect-billing-sources/SKILL.md before estimating hotspots from bill data.

Read the full file on GitHub · 127 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. 5d ago First seen · 127 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A afd50db24654

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lower-anthropic-bill is a skill published in the GitHub repository understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools (16 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,547 tokens. 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.