Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Comparison

The problem

Comparing infrastructure or deployment costs often leads to scope creep, like mixing sunk costs with future spend or stretching time horizons to justify a purchase. Developers and managers need a rigid, apples-to-apples comparison between two options without the bias of "typical" street prices or unsanctioned investment advice.

What it does

• Generates a standardized 12-month Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) report in Markdown.
• Separates Capex and Opex to prevent misleading amortization in monthly projections.
• Calculates a months-to-cover metric for options with higher upfront costs.
• Enforces a strict exclusions framework to strip out tax, legal, and residual value assumptions.
• Validates input data against dated rate files to ensure calculations are based on actual quotes rather than memory.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts often hallucinate market prices or offer subjective "best buy" recommendations that compromise financial audits. This skill enforces a fixed 12-month horizon and a closed set of accounting exclusions, ensuring the output is a cold, mathematical artifact suitable for a formal project folder.

Use cases

• Comparing self-hosted hardware versus managed cloud services for a new project.
• Evaluating two different SaaS vendor quotes using a dated rates file.
• Determining the break-even point for migrating from a monthly subscription to an annual license.
• Providing a standardized financial tick for a project workforce before setting product pricing.

Known limitations

Strictly limited to exactly two options and a 12-month horizon. Will block if quotes are undated, provided as ranges, or if Capex is amortized into monthly lines.