Free agent skills take 89.7% of installs across 4,902 labeled skills

Skillselion runs an independent directory of skills for coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and says it is not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI or Cursor. Its catalog is refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and the MCP registry and ranked by actual install counts. This survey narrows the lens to the subset of skills that carry a price label, which is why the report stresses that the figures describe 4,902 skills and say nothing about the remaining 58,434.

The label split shows where money sits. Of the 4,902 labeled skills, 3,450 are free, 1,215 are BYOK, 181 are freemium and 56 are paid. The install figures invert that emphasis: free skills take 89.7%, BYOK 7.7%, freemium 2.1% and paid 0.5%, with all 56 paid skills together at 454,127 installs. Median installs are close between the two groups, at 40 for free skills and 43 for cost-bearing ones, so the gap comes from a long tail rather than a typical skill being far more popular.

The report flags a second gap between labels and files. Saved excerpts are mostly the opening of SKILL.md, and the survey counts credential-like variable names in them. Among 1,421 skills whose excerpts mention such names, OPENAI_API_KEY appears in 107 skills from 39 accounts, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in 62 from 30 accounts and GITHUB_TOKEN in 35 from 28 accounts. Because the excerpts cover only the start of a file, the report says the data cannot settle whether the label or the code is correct, and it recommends checking files directly, including scripts, before installing.