The Agent Skill Pricing Census

Finding 01

Seven in ten priced agent skills are free

Each priced skill carries one of four labels. 3,450 skills (70.4%) are free: nothing to pay beyond the agent you already run. 1,215 (24.8%) are bring your own API key: the skill file costs nothing, but it calls a service that needs your own key and account. 181 (3.7%) are freemium, with a free tier and paid usage above it, and 56 (1.1%) are paid.

1. 1Free (3,450 skills)70.4%
2. 2Bring your own API key (1,215)24.8%
3. 3Freemium (181)3.7%
4. 4Paid (56)1.1%

Put the three cost labels together and 1,452 skills (29.6%) cost something to use. 83.7% of those are bring-your-own-key skills. Only 56 skills are labelled paid. For the rest, the cost is the API, model or SaaS account that the skill drives.

The Agent Economy Census (2026-08-09) counted 55 paid listings among 79,827 (0.07%) and described the unlabelled rest as costing nothing. This edition counts only skills that carry a pricing label, so its 1.1% is a share of priced skills, not of the whole catalog.

Finding 02

By installs, free skills take 89.7%

Count installs instead of skills and the free share grows. The 4,902 priced skills hold 84,668,769 installs. Free skills take 89.7% of them. Bring-your-own-key skills take 7.7%, freemium 2.1%, and paid skills 0.5% (454,127 installs across all 56).

1. 1Free89.7%
2. 2Bring your own API key7.7%
3. 3Freemium2.1%
4. 4Paid0.5%

So 29.6% of priced skills carry a cost, and they hold 10.3% of the installs. The typical skill looks the same on both sides: the median free skill has 40 installs and the median skill with any cost has 43.

Installs are cumulative registry install events, not active users or paying customers. Bundle installs count each bundled skill separately, so suite publishers weigh more in install shares.

Finding 03

Business and AI skills are the most likely to need your own key

The share that needs your own API key depends on the job. In business skills it is 43.4% (of 514 priced skills); in AI skills 39.4% (of 834). At the other end sit development (14.5% of 1,175), security (11.8% of 323) and productivity (11.3% of 506), and productivity skills are 86.8% free.

1. 1Business (514 priced)43.4%
2. 2AI (834)39.4%
3. 3Operations (401)31.4%
4. 4Growth (484)30.8%
5. 5Data (365)20.3%
6. 6Design (300)16.3%
7. 7Development (1,175)14.5%
8. 8Security (323)11.8%
9. 9Productivity (506)11.3%

Categories are the catalog's vertical category for each skill. Only categories with at least 300 priced skills are shown. The 1,215 bring-your-own-key skills come from 202 publishing accounts, and the largest single account publishes 89 of them.

Finding 04

Which API keys do agent skills ask for?

Labels are one signal. The other is what a skill's own file asks for. 15,455 skills have a stored documentation excerpt, usually the opening of their SKILL.md (24.4% of skills, 95.1% of installs). 1,421 of them (9.2%) name a credential-style variable, such as OPENAI_API_KEY or GITHUB_TOKEN, across 742 distinct variable names.

1. 1OPENAI_API_KEY (39 accounts)107
2. 2ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (30 accounts)62
3. 3GITHUB_TOKEN (28 accounts)35
4. 4GEMINI_API_KEY (21 accounts)29

Read the number of accounts beside the number of skills. The most-named variable overall is RUNCOMFY_TOKEN, in 132 skills, but those come from only 5 accounts. OPENAI_API_KEY appears in fewer skills (107) from many more publishers (39). Among keys that name a service, it reaches the most publishers; only the generic placeholder API_KEY reaches more (40 accounts).

The match counts upper-case names ending in _API_KEY, _APIKEY, _API_TOKEN, _ACCESS_TOKEN, _SECRET_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET or _KEY. A name in example code counts the same as a stated requirement, and the pattern also catches some non-secrets such as publishable keys and CSRF tokens. The excerpt keeps only the opening of each file, so later mentions are missed. Read 1,421 as a pattern count, not an exact count of required keys. Accounts are compared case-insensitively.

Method

Methodology

The census is a complete dump of the Skillselion production catalog taken on 2026-10-16: 85,807 listings, of which the 63,336 skill listings form this census. We pulled the full row for every skill (all 63,336 ids matched the snapshot index). Cumulative installs sum to 215,946,470 and count registry install events, chiefly from the skills.sh registry, not active users.

The pricing label is the catalog's pricing facet. Skillselion's tagging pass reads a skill's own documentation and assigns free, freemium, paid or byo-api-key (bring your own API key). The labels are almost all model-assigned and have not been systematically hand-audited. A skill without a label was not priced, and this census makes no claim about the other 58,434 skills. The priced set over-represents popular skills: it is 7.7% of skills but holds 39.2% of installs. The paid share here (1.1%) is a share of the 4,902 priced skills. The Agent Economy Census's 0.07% is a share of all 79,827 listings, so the two figures are not comparable.

The two signals do not always agree. Of the 763 free-labelled skills with a stored excerpt, 50 (6.6%) still name a credential variable in the stored excerpt. Of the 173 bring-your-own-key skills with an excerpt, 69 (39.9%) name one in the stored part of the file. Every number on this page recomputes from the dataset below with the verification script described in How Skillselion Research is done.

Skillselion is an independent project and is not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, GitHub, Cursor, Claude, Claude Code, or Codex, nor with any publisher or service named on this page.

Data

Download the dataset

The dataset has 63,336 rows, one per skill: id, publishing account, cumulative installs, vertical category, pricing label (blank when unpriced), stored documentation excerpt length, and the credential-style variable names matched in that excerpt. It is free to use with attribution under CC BY 4.0: cite "Skillselion Agent Skill Pricing Census, October 2026" and link this page.

Download the census CSV · 63,336 rows · 1.0 MB gzipped