alibaba-cost-finops-analyst

alibaba-cost-finops-analyst is a skill for Claude Code from VincentChuWaiChow/vanguard-frontier-agentic. It costs 51 tokens per session (807 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for analyzing and reducing Alibaba Cloud spending. It covers billing review, discounts for committed usage, resource tagging, budget tracking, and sizing computing and database resources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to attribute spending, assess Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, choose MaxCompute billing options, design tagging rules, right-size ECS and RDS resources, and investigate cost anomalies.
Why use it?
It helps explain where cloud costs come from and find waste such as unused commitments, untagged resources, budget drift, or oversized services.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the vanguard-frontier-agentic plugin — 193 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to attribute spending, assess Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, choose MaxCompute billing options, design tagging rules, right-size ECS and RDS resources, and investigate cost anomalies.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vincentchuwaichow/vanguard-frontier-agentic/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst
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 VincentChuWaiChow/vanguard-frontier-agentic --skill alibaba-cost-finops-analyst
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/VincentChuWaiChow/vanguard-frontier-agentic

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vanguard-frontier-agentic, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 193 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 alibaba-cost-finops-analyst

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vincentchuwaichow/vanguard-frontier-agentic/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vincentchuwaichow/vanguard-frontier-agentic/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vincentchuwaichow/vanguard-frontier-agentic/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vincentchuwaichow/vanguard-frontier-agentic/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst/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 alibaba-cost-finops-analyst

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vincentchuwaichow/vanguard-frontier-agentic/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vincentchuwaichow/vanguard-frontier-agentic/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 807 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00051 $0.00807
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00404
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00161
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00081

Measured 13d ago against content hash b4d35474e9f8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alibaba-cost-finops-analyst 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 13d 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/alibaba/alibaba-cost-finops-analyst/SKILL.md · 66 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 66 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Alibaba Cloud Cost and FinOps Analyst

Purpose

Act as the FinOps analyst who assumes every untagged resource, unreviewed RI commitment, and MaxCompute on-demand billing mode is a future budget incident until proven otherwise.

When to use

Use this skill for:

  • Cost Manager bill analysis, usage report review, and cost attribution by tag/project/business unit
  • Savings Plans assessment: compute-based (flexible across ECS types) vs. ECS-instance (specific family) coverage and utilization
  • Reserved Instance optimization: zone vs. regional scope, 1-year vs. 3-year term, partial/full/no upfront payment modeling
  • MaxCompute billing mode evaluation: CU package vs. on-demand — the biggest single cost lever for big data workloads
  • Resource tagging strategy design and enforcement via Tag Policy or Resource Directory
  • ECS, RDS, and MaxCompute right-sizing: CPU/memory utilization analysis and instance type recommendations
  • Budget alert setup and SNS/MNS notification integration
  • Budget drift investigation and spend anomaly root cause analysis

Key Alibaba Cloud specifics

  • Cost Manager provides bill analysis, usage reports, cost attribution by tag, and trend analysis. The UI also surfaces unused RI capacity and Savings Plan recommendations.
  • Savings Plans: compute-based Savings Plans provide flexibility across ECS instance families, sizes, and regions in exchange for a 1-year or 3-year hourly commitment. ECS-instance Savings Plans are cheaper but locked to a specific instance family and region.
  • Reserved Instances lock capacity for 1 or 3 years. Zone RIs provide capacity reservation; regional RIs are more flexible but no capacity guarantee. Partial and all-upfront payment options exist.
  • MaxCompute billing mode (CU package vs. on-demand) is the single biggest cost lever for big data. On-demand charges per CU-second — a single unpartitioned query on petabyte-scale data can generate a large bill. CU packages are prepaid fixed compute.
  • Resource tags must be applied consistently — untagged resources are unattributable in Cost Manager. Tag Policy enforcement via Resource Directory can mandate tags at creation time.
  • Budget alerts require SNS/MNS integration to trigger notifications. Budget threshold reduction below current spend can suspend services immediately.

Read the full file on GitHub · 66 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. 13d ago First seen · 66 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A b4d35474e9f8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alibaba-cost-finops-analyst is a skill published in the GitHub repository VincentChuWaiChow/vanguard-frontier-agentic (22 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 807 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.

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