How Much Does a Code Audit Cost in 2026?

A code audit for an early-stage startup costs somewhere between $49 and $15,000. That spread is not vendor margin. It is how many hours a senior engineer spends inside your system, and whether a person reads your code at all or a tool scans it and prints a list. Most startups should be looking at the $950 to $5,000 band.

The problem with asking "what does a code audit cost" is that four genuinely different products share the name. Below is what each one costs, what it actually buys, and how to tell which you are being sold. Every price here was read from the provider's own pricing page in August 2026 and is linked to its source, including ours.

The four tiers

Audit pricing clusters into four bands. The bands matter more than any individual vendor, because they tell you what kind of work you are buying.

Prices change without notice, and several of these confirm a final number only after a scoping call. Treat the table as a starting point for a shortlist, not a quote.

Under $1,300: an automated scan with a light human pass

At this price the work is mostly tooling. Dependency scanning, static analysis, pattern matching for known-risky shapes, and a severity-ranked list at the end. Turnaround is 24 to 72 hours precisely because a machine is doing most of it.

This is genuinely useful. A scan will find leaked secrets, unpatched dependencies with public CVEs, and obvious injection risks, and finding those for a few hundred dollars is a good trade. What it will not tell you is whether your architecture survives your next ten times the traffic, whether your data model is going to need a painful migration, or whether the thing is worth fixing at all. Nobody senior spent a day inside it, so nobody formed a judgement about it.

Watch the scope limits at this tier. Data Jackson, for example, publishes a cap of roughly 50,000 lines of code without prior scope confirmation, and excludes fixes entirely. That is honest of them, and it is the kind of boundary you should be looking for in every quote at this price.

$1,300 to $5,000: a senior engineer actually reads it

This is the first tier where a person follows your real user journeys through the code. The difference shows up in the findings: instead of "the application may be vulnerable to broken access control", you get "any authenticated user can read another user's records by changing the id in this request, here is the file and the line".

It is also the first tier where you can get a defensible answer to the question most founders are actually asking, which is not "is my code good" but "should I fix this, refactor it, or start again". That is a judgement call. It requires someone experienced to hold the whole system in their head for a few days, and there is no tool that does it.

$5,000 to $15,000: investor-grade diligence

Multi-repo coverage, infrastructure and deployment review, delivery process, dependency licensing, team and bus-factor risk, written for an audience that includes people who will never read code. This is what you buy when the audit is a fundraising artefact rather than an engineering one.

It is the right purchase before a priced round or an acquisition conversation. It is overkill when you simply need to know what is broken, and paying for it too early is one of the more common ways early-stage companies waste money on engineering services.

Above $15,000: transaction diligence

Private equity and M&A territory. Engineers, architects and cloud specialists over two to three weeks, often alongside a fractional CIO, producing a document that supports a purchase decision worth many multiples of the fee. If you are pre-Series A, this is not the product you are shopping for, and any vendor steering you toward it should be able to explain why in one sentence.

What belongs in the report

Whatever you pay, the deliverable should contain four things. If a vendor cannot confirm all four before you buy, that tells you what tier of work you are really getting.

• An executive summary a non-technical founder can read without a translator, stating the overall health of the system in plain language.
• Findings ranked by severity, each pointing at specific files and lines rather than describing a general category of problem.
• An architecture assessment that answers whether the system survives growth, not just whether it works today.
• A prioritised remediation plan with effort estimates, so you can decide what to fix now, what to schedule, and what to accept.

A raw vulnerability dump is not a report. Neither is a list of everything a linter disagreed with. You are paying for judgement about what matters, and the ordering of the findings is where that judgement shows up.

Red flags when you are comparing quotes

• A fixed price quoted before anyone has seen your repository. A fixed price after a short scoping call is a good sign, because the vendor has sized the work and is absorbing the risk of being wrong. Quoted sight-unseen, the same number is a guess, and guesses are priced defensively.
• No mention of who does the work. "Our team" can mean a principal engineer or an offshore contractor running a scanner. Ask for the seniority and the name.
• No sample report. Every serious provider has a redacted one.
• Fixes bundled invisibly into the audit price. Most audits at every tier deliver findings only, with remediation quoted separately. That is fine, but it means two quotes at the same price can be very different products.
• A recommendation to rebuild made before the audit. If the conclusion arrives before the evidence, you are being sold a build, not an audit.

What changes if AI tools wrote your code

The price does not change. Where the problems cluster does. Code generated by Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, Replit or Claude Code tends to fail in a consistent set of places, because the tools are good at producing plausible structure and bad at holding a security model in mind across a whole application.

In practice the recurring findings are authorisation that checks whether you are logged in but not whether the record is yours, database row-level security that was scaffolded permissively and never tightened, secrets that made it into client-side code, payment webhooks accepted without signature verification, and duplicated logic that was correct when generated and has since drifted apart. Tell whoever you hire which tools built the thing, and ask them to start there.

So what should you actually spend?

Match the tier to the decision you need to make. If you want a smoke test before a launch, the sub-$1,300 band is a sensible purchase and you should not feel undersold. If you are deciding whether to keep building on what you have, you want a person to read it, which starts around $1,300 and is properly resourced by about $5,000. If the audit needs to convince an investment committee, budget $5,000 to $15,000 and ask for an investor-facing summary explicitly.

Ours is the middle one. The $4,999 Tech Audit is five business days of a senior engineer reading your whole system, a 47-item report, a one-page action plan ordered by risk and effort, and a 30-minute walkthrough with the person who did the work. If a cheaper option in the table fits your situation better, take it. We would rather you spent well than spent with us. There is a full comparison of the options here.