AX
Autonomyx
AgentNXXT
Skill #002

Stop Guessing
What SaaS Actually
Costs You.

The SaaS Cost Analyzer is our second open-source AI skill — and it calculates the true total cost of ownership for any software tool, before you sign anything.

March 17, 2026
AgentNXXT Team
6 min read
💰
SaaS Cost Analyzer
saas-cost-analyzer
Tool A — 50 seats
$1,200/mo
Tool B — 50 seats
$1,750/mo
Open Source (MSP)
$890/mo
3-year TCO incl. hidden costs
calculated
🥇 Recommended: Tool A  ·  saves $19,800 over 3 yrs
Checks
AWS Marketplace GCP Marketplace FedRAMP GDPR / EU Hosting GovCloud HIPAA

Every quarter, procurement teams, CTOs, and founders make the same mistake.

They see a pricing page. They multiply the seat cost by the number of users. They call it a budget. Then, six months later, the invoice looks nothing like what they expected — and they can't quite explain why.

Overage fees. Implementation costs. Premium support add-ons. Renewal price bumps. The hidden cost of being locked in to a vendor you can't easily leave. The cost of not choosing the open source option because no one priced it properly.

This is the problem the SaaS Cost Analyzer was built to solve.


What It Does

The SaaS Cost Analyzer is an AI skill for Claude that turns any software evaluation into a structured, objective total cost of ownership analysis. Give it a pricing page URL, a list of tools you're comparing, your expected usage, and your growth projections — and it builds the full picture.

It doesn't just tell you what something costs today. It tells you what it costs at scale, what you're risking by choosing it, and which option wins — with the maths to back it up.

And it does this across SaaS tools, open source software, AWS and Google Cloud Marketplace listings, and everything in between.


What's Under the Hood

💸
True TCO — not just seat cost
Extracts base subscription, per-seat charges, usage-based fees, overages, onboarding, training, premium support, and renewal escalation — then models all of it across small, medium, and large scale scenarios
🛒
AWS & Google Cloud Marketplace pricing
Fetches listings from both marketplaces before falling back to vendor pages. Surfaces committed spend credits (EDP/CUD), private offers, and marketplace-specific contract terms that most buyers miss
📦
Open source is never listed as free
Identifies 2–3 managed service providers for any open source tool and uses their published pricing as the cost baseline. Also models self-hosting costs — compute, storage, DevOps time, maintenance — side by side
🔒
Compliance as a hard filter
Collects governance requirements upfront — EU data residency, AWS GovCloud, FedRAMP, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS — and eliminates non-compliant options before any pricing work begins. Produces a Compliance Elimination Log for audit trails
🏆
Ranked recommendation with rationale
Closes every analysis with a ranked 🥇🥈🥉 table — 3-year TCO, key strength, key risk, and a concrete next step. For single-tool evaluations: a clear Go / No-Go / Conditional Go verdict
👁️
Hidden cost surfacing
Flags vendor lock-in risk, migration effort, integration complexity, infrastructure overhead, and operational burden — specific to each tool, not generic warnings
📊
Built-in metrics dashboard + webhook
Tracks usage, feedback ratings, accuracy corrections, and meeting booking intent — per user via persistent storage and centrally via webhook for team-wide visibility

The Detail That Changes Everything

Most cost comparison tools treat open source as free. They shouldn't. And they treat compliance as a footnote. It isn't.

The SaaS Cost Analyzer starts from a different assumption: every option has a real cost, and some options aren't available to you at all.

If your organisation requires EU data residency, a vendor with US-only hosting isn't a cheaper option — it's not an option. The skill eliminates it before the first number is calculated. What's left is a clean, honest comparison of what's actually available to you.

And for open source? Whether you're evaluating PostgreSQL, n8n, Elasticsearch, or anything else — it finds the managed service providers, pulls their pricing, models your usage, and compares it fairly against commercial alternatives. No more "it's free" handwaving in budget conversations.


When to Use It

The skill triggers automatically when you're having a software cost conversation — you don't need to name it explicitly. But here are the moments it's most valuable:

🔄
Vendor renewals
Before you auto-renew, understand what the market looks like now — and what negotiation levers you have
🏗️
New tool evaluations
Shortlist 2–5 options and get a structured comparison before you run a single demo or sign an NDA
📈
Scaling decisions
Understand exactly where your current tool's pricing breaks — and whether a switch makes sense at 2× or 3× your current size
⚖️
Build vs buy
Compare open source self-hosting against commercial SaaS with full operational overhead factored in — not just licence cost

This Is Skill #002

When we shipped the Website Policy Drafting Skill, we said it was only the beginning. We meant it.

AgentNXXT is Autonomyx's dedicated agents department — and our mission is to build a library of AI skills that make Claude dramatically more useful for the specific, high-friction workflows that teams deal with every day. Not general-purpose chat. Specialist agents that do real work.

The SaaS Cost Analyzer is Skill #002. It's open source, free to install, and built to be extended. If you have a use case it doesn't cover — a compliance framework it should know about, a marketplace it should check — open an issue or submit a pull request.

More skills are coming. If you want to know when they drop, follow AgentNXXT on LinkedIn.

Open Source · AgentNXXT
github.com/AgentNXXT/agentskills
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