cost-optimization
Audit and reduce infrastructure and tooling costs without sacrificing reliability or velocity. Use this skill when reviewing monthly cloud or SaaS spend, finding unused resources, rightsizing infrastructure, negotiating vendor contracts, deciding what to consolidate, or planning for budget cuts. Triggers on cost optimization, cloud spend, SaaS spend, rightsizing, unused resources, FinOps, infrastructure audit, vendor consolidation, budget cut, cost review. Also triggers when finance flags rising costs or when a contract renewal is up.
Profile →npx skills add rampstackco/claude-skills --skill cost-optimization --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Cost Optimization Audit cloud, SaaS, and infrastructure spend. Cut what's not earning its keep. Rightsize what's oversized. Negotiate what's negotiable. Without breaking what works. --- ## When to use - Quarterly or annual cost review - Finance flags rising spend - Vendor contract renewal coming up - Budget cut required - New leadership wants the numbers - Migrating between providers (cost is part of the case) - Audit before scaling significantly (catch waste before it scales) ## When NOT to use - Active incident response (use `incident-response`) - Performance issues that happen to involve infrastructure (use `performance-optimization`) - Vendor evaluation for a new purchase (use `vendor-evaluation`) - Personnel or org costs (out of scope for this skill) --- ## Required inputs - Current cost (monthly, ideally for the last 12 months) - Cost broken down by service or vendor - Inventory of cloud resources (instances, databases, storage, etc.) - Inventory of SaaS subscriptions - Owners per cost line (who decided to spend this, who uses it) - Constraints (compliance, performance, contract terms) --- ## The framework: 5 levers Every cost optimization opportunity falls into one of thes
- When to use
- When NOT to use
- Required inputs
- The framework: 5 levers
- Lever 1: Eliminate
- Lever 2: Rightsize
- Lever 3: Restructure
- Lever 4: Negotiate
- Lever 5: Reframe
- Workflow
- Step 1: Pull the spend data
- Step 2: Categorize
- Step 3: Identify the biggest line items
- Step 4: Apply the 5 levers
What does the cost-optimization skill do?
Audit and reduce infrastructure and tooling costs without sacrificing reliability or velocity. Use this skill when reviewing monthly cloud or SaaS spend, finding unused resources, rightsizing infrastructure, negotiating vendor contracts, deciding what to consolidate, or planning for budget cuts. Triggers on cost optimization, cloud spend, SaaS spend, rightsizing, unused resources, FinOps, infrastructure audit, vendor consolidation, budget cut, cost review. Also triggers when finance flags rising costs or when a contract renewal is up.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add rampstackco/claude-skills --skill cost-optimization --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From rampstackco/claude-skills, a repository with 515 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.