Operations

Skill 88 of 200

Vendor Review

Evaluate a vendor — cost analysis, risk assessment, and recommendation.

1 minute · 242 words · 10 sections

Install

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill vendor-review

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

» /plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md (opens in a new tab).

Evaluate a vendor with structured analysis covering cost, risk, performance, and fit.

Usage

/vendor-review $ARGUMENTS

What I Need From You

Vendor name: Who are you evaluating?
Context: New vendor evaluation, renewal decision, or comparison?
Details: Contract terms, pricing, proposal document, or current performance data

Evaluation Framework

Cost Analysis (Total Cost of Ownership)

Total cost of ownership (not just license fees)
Implementation and migration costs
Training and onboarding costs
Ongoing support and maintenance
Exit costs (data migration, contract termination)

Risk Assessment

Vendor financial stability
Security and compliance posture
Concentration risk (single vendor dependency)
Contract lock-in and exit terms
Business continuity and disaster recovery

Performance Metrics

SLA compliance
Support response times
Uptime and reliability
Feature delivery cadence
Customer satisfaction

Comparison Matrix

When comparing vendors, produce a side-by-side matrix covering: pricing, features, integrations, security, support, contract terms, and references.

Output

## Vendor Review: [Vendor Name]
**Date:** [Date] | **Type:** [New / Renewal / Comparison]

### Summary
[2-3 sentence recommendation]

### Cost Analysis
| Component | Annual Cost | Notes |
|-----------|-------------|-------|
| License/subscription | $[X] | [Per seat, flat, usage-based] |
| Implementation | $[X] | [One-time] |
| Support/maintenance | $[X] | [Included or add-on] |
| **Total Year 1** | **$[X]** | |
| **Total 3-Year** | **$[X]** | |

### Risk Assessment
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|------|-----------|--------|------------|
| [Risk] | High/Med/Low | High/Med/Low | [Mitigation] |

### Strengths
- [Strength 1]
- [Strength 2]

### Concerns
- [Concern 1]
- [Concern 2]

### Recommendation
[Proceed / Negotiate / Pass] — [Reasoning]

### Negotiation Points
- [Leverage point 1]
- [Leverage point 2]

If Connectors Available

If ~~knowledge base is connected:

Search for existing vendor evaluations, contracts, and performance reviews
Pull procurement policies and approval thresholds

If ~~procurement is connected:

Pull current contract terms, spend history, and renewal dates
Compare pricing against existing vendor agreements

Tips

Upload the proposal — I can extract pricing, terms, and SLAs from vendor documents.
Compare vendors — “Compare Vendor A vs Vendor B” gets you a side-by-side analysis.
Include current spend — For renewals, knowing what you pay now helps evaluate price changes.

About this skill

Trigger

Evaluate a vendor — cost analysis, risk assessment, and recommendation. Use when reviewing a new vendor proposal, deciding whether to renew or replace a contract, comparing two vendors side-by-side, or building a TCO breakdown and negotiation points before procurement sign-off.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins, branch main, last pushed 23 September 2026.

Licence

Apache-2.0 — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

200 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 27 distinct layouts observed: bio-research/skills/*/SKILL.md, cowork-plugin-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, customer-support/skills/*/SKILL.md, data/skills/*/SKILL.md, design/skills/*/SKILL.md, engineering/skills/*/SKILL.md, enterprise-search/skills/*/SKILL.md, finance/skills/*/SKILL.md, human-resources/skills/*/SKILL.md, legal/skills/*/SKILL.md, marketing/skills/*/SKILL.md, operations/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/apollo/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/brand-voice/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/common-room/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/slack/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/contact-center/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/web/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/video-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/virtual-agent/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/zoom-mcp/*/SKILL.md, pdf-viewer/skills/*/SKILL.md, product-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, productivity/skills/*/SKILL.md, sales/skills/*/SKILL.md.

Issue colours

Resolved from the awesome-design-md registry — hue 39°, chroma 0.113. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Typefaces

Display: Copernicus is not available to us; set in Newsreader.

We never load a typeface at request time from a third-party origin, so a brand face we do not already self-host is substituted rather than fetched.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Removed “/vendor-review”, a leading h1 that duplicated the skill title.

Spec compliance

53 editorial notes across 41 of 200 skills. They are printed in the margin of each skill rather than as errors here.

and 31 more.

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Anthropic, declaring 120 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md (opens in a new tab).

Evaluate a vendor with structured analysis covering cost, risk, performance, and fit.

Usage

/vendor-review $ARGUMENTS

What I Need From You

Vendor name: Who are you evaluating?
Context: New vendor evaluation, renewal decision, or comparison?
Details: Contract terms, pricing, proposal document, or current performance data

Evaluation Framework

Cost Analysis (Total Cost of Ownership)

Total cost of ownership (not just license fees)
Implementation and migration costs
Training and onboarding costs
Ongoing support and maintenance
Exit costs (data migration, contract termination)

Risk Assessment

Vendor financial stability
Security and compliance posture
Concentration risk (single vendor dependency)
Contract lock-in and exit terms
Business continuity and disaster recovery

Performance Metrics

SLA compliance
Support response times
Uptime and reliability
Feature delivery cadence
Customer satisfaction

Comparison Matrix

When comparing vendors, produce a side-by-side matrix covering: pricing, features, integrations, security, support, contract terms, and references.

Output

## Vendor Review: [Vendor Name]
**Date:** [Date] | **Type:** [New / Renewal / Comparison]

### Summary
[2-3 sentence recommendation]

### Cost Analysis
| Component | Annual Cost | Notes |
|-----------|-------------|-------|
| License/subscription | $[X] | [Per seat, flat, usage-based] |
| Implementation | $[X] | [One-time] |
| Support/maintenance | $[X] | [Included or add-on] |
| **Total Year 1** | **$[X]** | |
| **Total 3-Year** | **$[X]** | |

### Risk Assessment
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|------|-----------|--------|------------|
| [Risk] | High/Med/Low | High/Med/Low | [Mitigation] |

### Strengths
- [Strength 1]
- [Strength 2]

### Concerns
- [Concern 1]
- [Concern 2]

### Recommendation
[Proceed / Negotiate / Pass] — [Reasoning]

### Negotiation Points
- [Leverage point 1]
- [Leverage point 2]

If Connectors Available

If ~~knowledge base is connected:

Search for existing vendor evaluations, contracts, and performance reviews
Pull procurement policies and approval thresholds

If ~~procurement is connected:

Pull current contract terms, spend history, and renewal dates
Compare pricing against existing vendor agreements

Tips

Upload the proposal — I can extract pricing, terms, and SLAs from vendor documents.
Compare vendors — “Compare Vendor A vs Vendor B” gets you a side-by-side analysis.
Include current spend — For renewals, knowing what you pay now helps evaluate price changes.