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startup concept

Tokencairn

Profiler that shows what each installed skill and MCP server really costs

Tokencairn instruments a user's assistant sessions and attributes token spend to each installed Agent Skill and MCP server, the way a browser profiler attributes CPU to tabs.

3

similar startups, last 2 years (3 all-time)

yes

7 matching federal grants and programs

Direction supported by government programs and grants

Test it before you build it

$250 · 3 weeks · 25 prospects

For $250 and 3 weeks, prove that Claude Max users who hit their caps will pre-pay $60 a year to see per-skill token cost, before any profiler is built.

Riskiest assumption · A Claude Max subscriber who hits the 5x or 20x cap will pay $12 a month for per-skill cost attribution, rather than treating limits as a fact of life or waiting for Anthropic to add it to the native usage view.

1Focus group: who and where

A solo developer on a Claude Max plan ($100 or $200 a month) running Claude Code with 10 or more installed skills and MCP servers, who hit the 5x or 20x usage cap before evening at least twice in the past two weeks and complained about it publicly.

where to find 25 · r/ClaudeAI (200k+ members; daily 'hit my Max limit by noon' threads - reply and DM the posters), the official Claude Developers Discord, and GitHub plus the Smithery.ai MCP directory: issue threads on popular MCP servers where users report context bloat, and agentskills.io publisher pages for people stacking many skills.

2Sell first, build later

A founding year of Tokencairn: one wrapper command that attributes your token spend to each installed skill and MCP server, with history, per-skill budgets, and cross-tool profiles, delivered November 2, 2026. Founding buyers get their first manual audit within a week of paying.

the ask · $60 for the founding year, locked for renewal; $144 a year after launch ($12 a month)

a real yes · A real yes is $60 through checkout. Compliments, waitlist emails without a card, and 'I'd install the free skill' do not count.

3Small experiments

The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.

  1. 1. Fifteen profiling calls with cap-hitters

    $0 · 10 days

    DM 40 recent limit-complainers from r/ClaudeAI and the Discord and book 15 twenty-minute calls. On each call, screen-share their session logs, hand-rank their ten costliest skills and MCP servers using a throwaway parsing script, and ask two questions: could you name your costliest skill before this call, and will you pay $60 now for the founding year. Close every call with a live checkout link.

    keep going if · 10 of 15 cannot name their costliest skill unaided, and 5 of 15 pay the $60 founding year on the call

  2. 2. Founding-year pre-order page

    $150 · 14 days

    Put up a one-page site: the ranked cost table screenshot from the calls, the $60 founding year (regular $144), delivery date November 2, 2026, card checkout. Post it once each in r/ClaudeAI and the Discord's show-and-tell channel and put $100 into Reddit ads targeting r/ClaudeAI.

    keep going if · 3% or more of visitors start checkout and at least 10 of the first 300 visitors pay $60

  3. 3. MCP cost leaderboard post

    $100 · 10 days

    Manually measure the per-call context overhead of the 10 most-installed MCP servers from the Smithery.ai directory (about $100 of Claude API spend) and publish the ranked table as a post on r/ClaudeAI with a link to the priced page. This tests whether attribution content pulls this audience, which is the whole free-skill distribution wedge.

    keep going if · the post clears 50 upvotes and 8% of readers click through to the priced page

4Collect a deposit up front

Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.

$60

per prospect, refundable

how · A refundable $60 pre-order taken by card on the landing page checkout. A hosted card checkout is the right rail here because the buyer is a developer buying a $60 online subscription with no approval chain, and the same page becomes the product's real signup later. set up: Stripe Checkout ↗

what it reserves · The founding price of $60 a year for life of the subscription, a slot in the first cohort, and a manual audit of their own setup within a week of paying

refund · Fully refundable with one email any time before launch on November 2, 2026 and for 30 days after.

target · 15 paid pre-orders from 40 conversations plus 300 landing visitors within 21 days

Go: build it if

15 or more $60 pre-orders in 21 days, at least 10 of 15 interviewees unable to name their costliest skill, and 3%+ visitor-to-checkout on the page: build it.

Kill: stop if

Fewer than 5 pre-orders after 40 conversations and 300 visitors, or 10 of 15 interviewees already answer the question with Claude Code's built-in /cost and usage views: stop, the native-tab risk is already real.

5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open

outreach message

Saw your post about hitting the Max cap by lunch. I'm building Tokencairn: one wrapper command that ranks which of your installed skills and MCP servers actually burn your tokens, like a browser profiler attributes CPU to tabs. Before I build the paid version I'm doing 15 free 20-minute profiling sessions with heavy Claude Code users; you leave with your ten costliest skills ranked from your own logs. Want one of the slots this week?

landing page

See which skills and MCP servers are eating your tokens $60 founding year (then $144): ranked per-skill cost, history, budgets, every tool on the standard Reserve your founding spot - $60, fully refundable until launch on November 2, 2026

deposit terms

You are paying $60 for the founding year of Tokencairn, delivered November 2, 2026, and a manual audit of your own setup within a week. The $60 locks your price at $60 a year instead of $144. Full refund with one email any time before launch or within 30 days after.

Would you run this test?

One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.

Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.

Scorecard

Ranked against every idea in the catalog: trend, demand and 100x potential from the corpus, competition relative to the other ideas. A generated concept has no judges or swipes yet, so its pillars use the data signals only.

68

Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 42.3 x 1.61

Warm

competition: more crowded than 52% of ideas · headwind x0.74

+2.7

government priorities, secondary (7 matching grants)

Trend

49

Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.

  • Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)96
  • Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector0
  • Sector direction (live batch)50

Demand

40

Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.

  • YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
  • Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)50

100x potential

78

Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.

  • Neighbours still alive78

Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 382 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were profiler, shows, installed, skill, mcp, server, really, instruments.

The concept in full

What
Tokencairn instruments a user's assistant sessions and attributes token spend to each installed Agent Skill and MCP server, the way a browser profiler attributes CPU to tabs. It flags servers that bloat context on every call, tracks cost per skill across versions, and lets the user pin a token budget into a skill's config before installing it. In the first hour a Claude Code or Codex user runs one wrapper command and gets a ranked table of their ten costliest skills and servers.
Grounded in (2025-2026 signals)
Agent Skills launched October 16, 2025, released as an open standard on December 18, 2025, with about 40 supporting products by June 2026 including Claude, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, VS Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI and Goose. MCP at 10,000 active servers (December 9, 2025). Woz (yc W25) charges to cut Claude Code token cost by 50%, proving users pay for this pain.
What it rides
'Agent Skills: launched October 16, 2025, an open standard since December 18': with about 40 products supporting the standard by June 2026, users accumulate skills from many sources with zero visibility into what each one costs per invocation.
Why now
Between the October 16, 2025 launch of Agent Skills and the roughly 40 supporting products of June 2026, per-skill cost attribution went from meaningless to necessary in eight months; 10,000 active MCP servers means every heavy user carries unaudited context overhead.
Wedge: first customer and entry point
Claude Max subscribers hitting their 5x and 20x limits early in the day; distribution is itself a free skill published on agentskills.io that profiles the user's other skills, with a $12 a month tier for history, budgets and cross-tool profiles.
Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
Woz is closest but cuts cost wholesale inside Claude Code; Tokencairn attributes cost per skill and per MCP server across every tool supporting the open standard, and works when the user is deciding what to install, not just what to compress.
Main risk
Anthropic adds per-skill cost reporting to its native usage view and the standalone profiler collapses into a built-in tab.

Similar startups in the directory

Companies whose pitch matches most of the concept's terms (profiler, shows, installed, skill, mcp, server, really, instruments).

  • Palma.aiplugandplay PnP 2026 · 2026alive

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  • Armatureyc X26 · 2026 · Agent infrastructurealive

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  • Scopeyc X26 · 2026 · Developer toolsalive

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Public money in this direction

US federal grants and open opportunities matched to the concept's terms.

Other concepts in this collection

Fictional concept generated 2026-08-26 by claude-fable-5 from the collection's brief and MarkosWeb data. Treat it as a research prompt, not a plan.