cost-estimator

cost-estimator is a skill for Claude Code from XuanRanL/loamwright-SEO-Skill. It costs 52 tokens per session (1,075 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A pre-flight estimate for an automated article-writing run, showing expected US-dollar costs by category, an 80% confidence range, and a budget check.

In plain words
What is it for?
It estimates costs from an article format and word count, or from an existing brief, with options for image count, image quality, batching, and machine-readable output.
Why use it?
It lets someone assess the likely cost before committing time and money to an article run.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the xuanran-seo-blog-writer plugin — 68 skills, 34 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit It estimates costs from an article format and word count, or from an existing brief, with options for image count, image quality, batching, and machine-readable output.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/xuanranl/loamwright-seo-skill/cost-estimator
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 XuanRanL/loamwright-SEO-Skill --skill cost-estimator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/XuanRanL/loamwright-SEO-Skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install xuanran-seo-blog-writer, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 68 skills, 34 agents, 4 hooks.

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 cost-estimator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xuanranl/loamwright-seo-skill/cost-estimator/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xuanranl/loamwright-seo-skill/cost-estimator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xuanranl/loamwright-seo-skill/cost-estimator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xuanranl/loamwright-seo-skill/cost-estimator/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 cost-estimator

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xuanranl/loamwright-seo-skill/cost-estimator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xuanranl/loamwright-seo-skill/cost-estimator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,075 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 $0.00052 $0.01075
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00537
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00215
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00108

Measured 11d ago against content hash de361bf096a3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cost-estimator 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.

subskills/cross-cutting/cost-estimator/SKILL.md · 105 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 105 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cost Estimator (Pre-flight)

Before user commits 30 min + $2.40 to /article, show them the estimate.

When to invoke

  • /cost-estimate — defaults to listicle 6000w
  • /cost-estimate listicle 6000
  • /cost-estimate --brief workspace/abc/brief.json
  • User asks: "how much for a pillar page?", "what does an article cost?", "is this gonna be over budget?"
  • Auto-trigger via L1 SKILL.md before phase-research starts (mandatory pre-flight)

How to invoke

# By format + word count
python -m scripts._core.cost_estimator --format listicle --words 6000

# From an existing brief.json
python -m scripts._core.cost_estimator --brief workspace/abc123/brief.json --json

# With cheaper config
python -m scripts._core.cost_estimator \
    --format how-to-guide --words 4500 \
    --images 2 --image-quality medium --batch

# Machine-readable
python -m scripts._core.cost_estimator --format pillar-page --json

Output (human-readable)

━━━ /article cost estimate ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  Format: listicle (target 6000 words)
  Images: 6 × high-quality 1024² (batch)   ← count = image_policy.DEFAULT_IMAGE_COUNT (format rows may set fewer)
  Drafter / pipeline model: claude-opus-4-7 / claude-opus-4-7
  Cache hit rate assumed: 30%

Breakdown:
  Research (Tavily ×8 adv search + 12 extracts): $0.1664
  Drafting (6000w via claude-opus-4-7, 21,000 in + 8,400 out + 9,000 cached): $0.3360
  Pipeline stages (13 stages, 124,000 in + 13,500 out via claude-opus-4-7): $0.6469
  Images (4 × gpt-image-2 high 1024² batch): $0.4220
  Overhead buffer (10%): $0.1571

  TOTAL:         $1.73
  80% range:    $1.30 – $2.25

  ✓ Within budget.

Typical costs by format (rough)

Format Words Est. cost (high+batch)
news-analysis 1500 ~$1.40
definition 3500 ~$2.00
how-to-guide 4500 ~$2.40
product-review 4500 ~$2.40
comparison 4500 ~$2.50
case-study 5500 ~$3.10
listicle 6000 ~$1.73
pillar-page 6500 ~$3.40

Read the full file on GitHub · 105 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. 11d ago First seen · 105 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A de361bf096a3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cost-estimator is a skill published in the GitHub repository XuanRanL/loamwright-SEO-Skill (49 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,075 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.