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Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Comparison
Compare two deployment options over a 12-month horizon with strict capex/opex separation and dated rate validation.
$5
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Comparison
Example session with this skill installed
Run a TCO for 'Project Saturn' comparing 'Cloud-Managed' ($0 capex, $800/mo opex) vs 'On-Prem' ($6000 capex, $200/mo opex) based on quotes from rates_v2.json dated 2024-10-01. Set currency to USD.
- Read your context and instructions
- Compiled the total cost
I have generated the 12-month TCO comparison for Project Saturn. The analysis compares the Cloud-Managed and On-Prem deployment options based on the provided rates.
Project Saturn TCO Comparison (12-Month)
Product: Project Saturn
Options: Cloud-Managed, On-Prem
Horizon: 12 Months
Rates As Of: 2024-10-01
Currency: USD
Status: Ready
Not tax, legal, or investment advice.
Options
- Cloud-Managed: Full managed service deployment with zero upfront hardware cost.
- On-Prem: Local hardware deployment requiring significant initial capital expenditure.
Frozen Quotes
| Category | Cloud-Managed | On-Prem |
|---|---|---|
| Capex (One-time) | $0.00 | $6,000.00 |
| Monthly Opex | $800.00 | $200.00 |
Costs
Option A: Cloud-Managed
$0.00 (Capex) + 12 × $800.00 (Monthly) = $9,600.00
Option B: On-Prem
$6,000.00 (Capex) + 12 × $200.00 (Monthly) = $8,400.00
Comparison
- Cloud-Managed 12-month TCO: $9,600.00
- On-Prem 12-month TCO: $8,400.00
- Delta (B - A): -$1,200.00
- Cheaper Option: On-Prem
- Months-to-cover: 10.00 ($6,000.00 extra capex / $600.00 monthly savings)
Excluded
| Excluded | Why |
|---|---|
| Tax, depreciation, credits | Not tax advice |
| Legal structure, licenses, ToS risk | Not legal advice |
| Return, yield, "good investment" | Not investment advice |
| Month 13+ hardware replacement | Horizon is 12 |
| Resale / residual value | No dated bid |
Residual
- filed: no
- priced: no
- advised: no
Next steps
- Review
docs/tco.mdfor the full arithmetic breakdown. - Verify the
On-Premsupport requirements in your workforce plan. - Pass this TCO to the
unit-economicsskill if per-user margin analysis is required.
Connects securely to your tools. The creator never sees your data.
What you get
About this skill
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.
How to install
Works the same in every agent - Claude, Cursor, Codex, Copilot and 20+ more.
- 1
Download the ZIP
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- 2
Unzip into your skills folder
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- 3
Ask your agent to use it
Restart the agent if it was already running. It picks the skill up automatically - no config needed.
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Click the path to copy it. Create the folder if it does not exist yet.
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