Where to Get Claude Code Skills: Directory vs Marketplace vs Depot

Ask where to requisition Claude Code skills and you get three answers, because there are three kinds of supplier — and each is built for a different job. A free bulk directory hands you the whole warehouse at no charge and lets you sort the crates yourself. A multi-vendor marketplace is a bazaar: many sellers, one checkout, quality that shifts stall to stall. A single-source depot is one supplier who curates a short shelf, tests each item, and puts its name on all of it. None is "best" in the abstract. The right one depends on whether you're optimizing for selection, variety, or a source you can hold accountable. Here's each, plainly, with the buyer it fits — including the buyer who should walk right past the depot.

The three ways to get Claude Code skills

A skill is a plain SKILL.md file — see What Is a SKILL.md File? for the anatomy. Getting one is easy. The question is provenance: where a skill comes from decides whether you can trust it before you run it. And it runs with your agent's permissions, so provenance isn't cosmetic — it's the whole risk.

Model 1: The free bulk directory

The biggest shelves. SkillsMP indexes on the order of 2.2 million scraped SKILL.md files. LobeHub is more polished at roughly 169,000. claudemarketplaces.com is a neutral aggregator at around 23,000. All free, all searchable.

Where it genuinely wins: selection and price. Nothing else is close on either. If the skill you need exists anywhere, one of these has it, and it costs nothing.

The catch is verification — the absence of it. These catalogs scrape; they don't vet. A public audit of one scraped set counted 140,963 issues across 22,511 skills, roughly 36% carrying prompt-injection patterns. A skill runs with your agent's permissions, so a poisoned file isn't a typo — it's an instruction your agent may follow. Volume is the metric these catalogs optimize, and volume is also what hides the bad crate.

Best for: anyone who wants maximum free selection and will read each file end-to-end before running it. If a skill is short enough to audit yourself and you trust where it came from, take the free one. That's not a grudging admission — it's the correct call for that buyer.

Model 2: The multi-vendor marketplace

A storefront where many creators list their own skills under one roof and one checkout. Agensi runs a creator ecosystem paying sellers around 70%. ClaudeSkills.ai pushes payout to roughly 90%.

Where it genuinely wins: variety and the creator ecosystem. You get range no single seller could produce, priced per listing, with new gear arriving as creators publish. Hunting a specific niche a solo shop would never build? The bazaar is where it turns up.

The honest caveat: a high creator payout is a creator-acquisition tactic, not a buyer-quality guarantee. A 90% split recruits sellers; it says nothing about whether a given listing was tested. Quality varies stall to stall, and the platform's incentive is to grow the vendor roster, not to prove any one skill does the job. Where verification exists, it's per-seller and uneven.

Best for: buyers who want breadth across many creators and are comfortable evaluating each seller on their own — or who've already found a vendor on the platform they trust.

Model 3: The single-source depot

One supplier, a short curated shelf, one name on every item. AgentSource is a depot: 14 skills, each curated, each shipping a field report — real captured output from a documented run, readable before you pay — all maintained by the same factory that ported them from 15+ shipped App Store apps. Pricing is one-time: $9 a skill, $29 a category stack, $49 for the Full Kit. No subscription. A 7-day no-questions refund, and a locker that re-issues the latest version forever.

Where the depot wins — and where it doesn't. It does not win on selection (14 items against millions) or on price against free. What it trades on is a single accountable source and proof before pay. You don't audit each file yourself and you don't vet a roster of strangers; you read the field report, see what the skill actually did on a real run, and one maintainer stands behind all of it. Each skill also sits on its own indexable page — Deep QA Audit Loop, MCP Tool Reliability Auditor, iOS Paywall Playbook — so you can read the gear before deciding.

Best for: buyers who'd rather pay a few dollars once than audit a scraped file or vet a marketplace seller, and who value one source they can hold accountable over a warehouse they have to sort. Wrong for: anyone optimizing for maximum free selection. That buyer belongs at a directory, and the depot will say so.

A related form: the single-seller bundle

Worth naming, because it's close. Ryan Dozer's "Claude Code Skill Stack" is a single-seller bundle — one $99 one-time package sold off his own site through Stripe on organic traffic. It proves the paid model works, which matters. The difference from a depot is structure: it's one sales page, so there's no per-skill indexable page and no pre-purchase proof for each item — you buy the bundle on the strength of the pitch. A depot splits the same idea into individual, separately-provable units.

Claude Code skills directory vs marketplace vs depot

Model	Selection size	Verification	Price	Who stands behind quality	Best for
Free bulk directory SkillsMP · LobeHub · claudemarketplaces.com	Huge — ~2.2M / ~169k / ~23k files	None at scale; bulk-scraped, unvetted	Free	No one — you audit each file	Maximum free selection, if you'll read every file first
Multi-vendor marketplace Agensi · ClaudeSkills.ai	Broad — many creators	Per-seller, uneven	Per listing (varies)	Each seller, separately	Variety across creators; a vendor you already trust
Single-source depot AgentSource	Small — 14 curated skills	Field report per skill, one maintainer	$9 / $29 / $49 one-time	One factory, on every item	Proof before pay, one accountable source

Which supplier fits you

• You want the most skills for free and will vet them yourself → directory. Full stop. Don't pay for what you'll audit anyway.
• You want range across many creators, or one specific niche skill → marketplace. Accept that you're the quality filter, seller by seller.
• You want a short, tested shelf with proof before pay and one accountable source → depot.
• You want everything in one purchase and trust a single pitch → a single-seller bundle.

Most operators use more than one. Pull a free skill you can read in two minutes from a directory; requisition the tested, documented gear for the jobs you can't afford to get wrong from a depot.

Where the official skills fit

One more supplier sits under all of this: Anthropic maintains its own open repository, anthropics/skills. It's the reference source, and everything above runs on the same runtimes — compatible with Claude Code, claude.ai, and Codex — because a SKILL.md is plain, portable Markdown. A depot doesn't compete with the official repo; it curates, tests, and maintains gear that runs in the same place. "Compatible with Claude Code, claude.ai & Codex" is a statement about where the file runs, not a claim of affiliation.

Once you've picked a supplier, see How to Install a Skill for the exact steps in each runtime.