Shult

Token Consumer — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

Measure and shrink the token cost of Claude Code skills, tier by tier: the always-on system-prompt tax, the per-invocation body, and on-demand references, each priced at the rate it is actually billed.

How to install Token Consumer

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open Shult/token_consumer and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Token Consumer does

Alternatives in Development

Arrecall — AgentRecall on-demand recall — surface past fixes, decisions, and patterns mid-session without leaving your fl 370 ★
Check Setup.En — Top-level alias — see lesson/check-setup.en.md for the full body 347 ★
Gov Backlinks — Free .gov backlinks - drive the user's browser through SAM.gov, the SBA small business listing, and state vend 195 ★

README

tokc — token consumption analyzer for Claude Code skills

[![CI](https://github.com/Shult/token_consumer/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/Shult/token_consumer/actions/workflows/ci.yml) [![PyPI](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/tokc.svg)](https://pypi.org/project/tokc/) [![Python](https://img.shields.io/pypi/pyversions/tokc.svg)](https://pypi.org/project/tokc/) [![License: MIT](https://img.shields.io/badge/license-MIT-blue.svg)](LICENSE)

Measures what a skill actually costs you, tier by tier, and tells you where to cut.

  29 skill(s)   tokenizer: o200k_base x1.180 (default)

  SKILL                   T1/sess   T2/use      T3  ALWAYS-ON TAX                  $/mo
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  project-artifact            241    5,415    8.5k  ████████████████████████ !   $2.99
  receipts                    159    4,865     20k  ████████████████         !   $2.40
  hook-development            140    4,548     16k  ██████████████               $2.20
  ...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  TOTAL                     2,787   99,352    294k                               $45.65

  Always-on tax
    2,787 tokens ride in the system prompt of every request, in every session,
    whether or not any skill fires.
    -> 2.9M billed token-equivalents/month at 200 sessions x 40 requests

  Listing budget  (characters, not tokens)
    ████████████████████████████████████████  10,577 / 8,000 chars  (132%)
    window 200,000 tokens x 4 chars/token -- model `sonnet`, ~/.claude/settings.json
    ! 2,577 chars over budget -- 6 skill(s) ship as `- name`, description omitted
      demoted, least-used first: plugin-structure, project-artifact, receipts, ...

Why this exists

Existing tools estimate skill cost by asking Claude — which costs tokens and gives different numbers each run — or by running `tiktoken` over `SKILL.md`, which **undercounts Claude by 15-20%*