A Claude Code skill · field tool Nº 001
Scrooge
The Claude Code skill that refuses to overpay. It routes every piece of AI work to the cheapest model that can do it right: frontier brains where it counts, penny labor everywhere else, and a receipt at the end showing what you kept. Type /scrooge. That's the whole workflow.
new to all this? see how it works, in plain english →
God bless us, every one. Except the ones billing you.
Nº 01 · the problem
Every model bills
like a partner.
Most of the work
is paralegal.
Hand Claude a big task and one expensive model does all of it. The same frontier brain that architects your system also greps your files, renames your variables, and reads your logs.
That grunt work is ninety percent of most jobs, and a model a tenth the price does it identically. You'd never staff a project this way. Your AI shouldn't either.
what a million tokens costs, by model
blended per-million-token rates, claude api list pricing, typical 70/30 input/output split. the gold bar is where scrooge sends the grunt work.
Nº 02 · how it works
A foreman,
not a freelancer.
Scrooge turns your session into a job site. Your main model stops doing the labor and starts running the crew. Four moves, every task, automatically.
Move 01
Decompose
The task becomes a graph. Every node gets classified: mechanical, judgment, or genuinely hard. No guessing, no routing by mood. Stakes never inflate a node. Only difficulty does.
Move 02
Route
Mechanical work goes to the cheapest capable model. Bounded judgment goes mid-tier. The truly hard calls go to the strongest model available, at full effort. It reads your setup first, so it works whether you run Haiku or Fable 5.
Move 03
Swarm
Independent work runs in parallel, in waves, the moment it unblocks. Every agent gets a precise brief and a hard output cap, so a dozen workers never flood the room with essays.
Move 04
Verify, then bill
No agent's word is taken for it. Artifacts get checked, failures escalate one tier with evidence attached, and the run closes with a receipt: what it would have cost, what it did, what you kept.
Newer still, Scrooge decides who runs the crew. When the work is routine, it lets a cheap-to-run coordinator manage the busywork instead of your top model, and it hands control straight back the moment a hard call shows up. That quietly kills the biggest hidden cost, the manager re-reading the whole conversation on every turn, without ever putting your quality at risk.
quality is the constraint scrooge optimizes under, not against. cheap output that fails a check gets escalated, never shipped.
Nº 03 · the math
Napkin math,
real prices.
Nothing here is a growth-hack number. It's Claude API list pricing and the boring arithmetic of sending cheap work to cheap models.
worked example · one real-shaped task
The 3-million-token refactor.
A serious codebase job: survey, plan, edit, test, verify. Run straight through Opus, all three million tokens bill at frontier rates.
Scrooged, roughly 80 percent rides the cheap tier, 15 percent gets mid-tier judgment, and the hardest 5 percent still gets the frontier brain it deserves. Same output. A third the invoice. On a Fable 5 session the gap roughly doubles.
estimated cost · same task, two ways
estimate at list pricing: 3M tokens at ~$11/MTok blended, vs 80/15/5 routed across haiku, sonnet, and opus. run it daily and the difference is thousands a year.
On a metered API plan, Scrooge pays for itself the first serious afternoon. On a subscription, it stretches the same usage limits across three to five times the work. Either way, the receipt does the bragging. the counting-house arithmetic
Nº 04 · the bit
The Dickens
is rationed.
Scrooge has a personality: a reformed Victorian miser who grumbles once when the work starts and files one mock loss report when it lands. Two lines of theater per task. That's the entire ration.
In between, silence and work. No jokes mid-task, no bits over broken builds. The receipt uses your run's real delegation counts and real list pricing, clearly labeled as estimates. The comedy is small. The number at the bottom isn't.
Somewhere in San Francisco, a ledger weeps. Estimates, not an invoice. But the ledger doesn't lie by much.
Nº 05 · in the box
One file.
Every session,
cheaper.
- The Scrooge skill, installed with one unzip. Type /scrooge and hand it any task.
- Model-agnostic routing. It reads your session first, then adapts: Haiku base, Sonnet base, Opus, Fable 5, all covered.
- Works with vanilla Claude Code or a custom agent roster. No dependencies, no config, no API keys of its own.
- Quality guardrails baked in: artifact verification, two-strike escalation, and a hard rule that cheap output never ships unchecked.
- The receipt. Real delegation counts, real list pricing, honest estimates of what you kept.
- The desktop meter for Mac: a live paper-receipt meter in your menu bar, a global hotkey, a lifetime ledger with history, drag-to-place, all local.
- Every-outlet setup, built into the installer: a guided walkthrough adds Scrooge to the Claude app, chat and Cowork, and to claude.ai on the web. Three steps, about a minute, on by itself the moment it uploads.
- No telemetry: your ledger never leaves your Mac.
It's a skill, not a platform. Nothing phones home, nothing subscribes you to anything, nothing sits between you and your work.
You get a precisely written instruction set that turns any Claude Code session into a disciplined, parallel, cost-routed operation. Built and battle-tested by Paul Von Rieter across the builds on the operator site: tEE, CRUMB, WERKS, GainSail, and the rest of the arsenal.
the offer
Ten dollars.
It tips itself.
- Instant access: checkout lands you on the install page
- Installed in about sixty seconds, one unzip
- Works on every Claude Code plan, API or subscription
- Yours forever. No renewal, ever.
field tool Nº 001 · digital delivery
Scrooge
secure card checkout by stripe. you'll be redirected to the install page the moment payment clears.
Includes the Scrooge skill and the Scrooge desktop meter for Mac. One purchase, both tools.
Nº 06 · fair questions