Code Audit Cost: Why Audit Firms Set Higher Minimums
What four kinds of code audit cost, and the minimums 491 listed audit firms actually state.
A code audit cost runs from about $2,000 to $80,000 or more, because firms sell at least four different products under the same name: a red-flag review, a focused audit, a full audit and an investment-grade review for an acquisition. As of October 2026, 46.4% of the 491 firms listed on Edverise for code review and technical audits state a minimum project of $10,000 or more, so a $5,000 budget buys a scoped red-flag review, not a full audit.
Updated November 2026.
A four-figure quote and a mid five-figure quote for the same codebase are rarely two prices for one job. They are usually two different jobs, and neither quote says so on the first page.
Four products sold as one code audit
The pages that rank for this query are almost all written by firms selling the work, and each one prices only its own menu. Read side by side, they show the same pattern: a cheap, fast pass that flags the worst problems, and a slower, staffed engagement that ends in a long written report. The table below sets the four published menus against each other. Every band is the seller's own figure, not a market survey.
| What you are buying | Published price | Published duration | Who says so |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automated scan only | Free to $500 | Not stated | Variant Systems |
| Red-flag review or flash review | $4,000 to $12,000; EUR 8,000 to 12,000 | About five business days; 5 to 7 days | Fora Soft; Kolonell |
| Focused audit | $2,000 to $5,000; $15,000 to $30,000 (security) | 2 to 3 weeks (security) | Variant Systems; Bolder Apps |
| Full audit with a written report | $5,000 to $10,000; $18,000 to $45,000; $30,000 to $60,000 | 10 to 14 days; 3 to 5 weeks | Variant Systems; Fora Soft; Bolder Apps |
| Enterprise, compliance or investment-grade | $10,000 to $20,000+; $50,000 to $80,000+; $70,000 to $180,000 | 4 to 6 weeks; three to five weeks | Variant Systems; Bolder Apps; Fora Soft |
The middle row is where buyers get lost. Variant Systems prices its broadest standard audit at $5,000 to $10,000. Bolder Apps uses the same tier name for an audit of architecture, security, performance, maintainability, tests and dependencies at $30,000 to $60,000, over 3 to 5 weeks. Same label, six times the price. A quote that names a tier without naming its deliverable tells you almost nothing.
Fora Soft is the most specific about what the money buys. Its full audit is two auditors over 10 to 14 days and a report of 30 to 60 pages with an executive summary, findings by section and a remediation plan. Its red-flag summary is one page, and the firm says it offers that page free as the first step of a deeper engagement. Hold that thought for later: the firm that finds the problems is often the firm hoping to be paid to fix them.
What code audit cost floors look like across 491 listed firms
The seller pages describe what one firm charges. The Edverise listings show what the supply side as a whole will accept. As of October 2026, 491 firms are listed in the code review and technical audits category, and every one of them states a minimum project size.
| Stated minimum | Firms | Share of the category |
|---|---|---|
| $0 | 49 | 10% |
| $1,000 | 112 | 22.8% |
| $5,000 | 102 | 20.8% |
| $10,000 | 110 | 22.4% |
| $25,000 | 70 | 14.3% |
| $50,000 | 30 | 6.1% |
| $75,000 | 4 | 0.8% |
| $100,000 | 8 | 1.6% |
| $250,000 | 6 | 1.2% |
Add the bands from $10,000 upward and 228 of the 491 listed firms, or 46.4%, will not take a project smaller than $10,000. Another 118, or 24.0%, set the bar at $25,000 or higher. At the other end, 161 firms, or 32.8%, state a minimum below $5,000.
The highest share of $10,000 floors in any large category
That 46.4% is unusual. Among the 198 Edverise categories with 300 or more listings, no other has a larger share of firms stating $10,000 or more. The runner-up, AI model fine-tuning and training, sits at 40.7%. Closer to home, the comparison is starker:
| Category | Firms listed | $10,000 or more |
|---|---|---|
| Code review and technical audits | 491 | 46.4% |
| QA and software testing | 4,559 | 28.4% |
| Software development services | 2,247 | 26.3% |
| Cybersecurity assessments and hardening | 8,203 | 13.9% |
So the firms that review code ask for a bigger first engagement than the firms that write it. Firms listed for software development services state $10,000 or more at roughly half the audit rate, and testing shops listed under QA and software testing are not far behind them. Across the whole catalogue, the median category has just 7.1% of its firms in the $10,000 band alone. The wider pattern of stated floors is in the companion piece on agency minimum project size.
The listings do not say why, and no source read for this post measures it. A plausible reading is that an audit is mostly senior reading time plus a report someone will put their name to, and neither scales down well. Take that as an interpretation, not a finding.
The case for the cheap end
The opposite view deserves a fair hearing. 263 listed firms, or 53.6%, state a minimum of $5,000 or less, so a small, honest audit is easy to buy. For a codebase of a few screens and one API, a senior engineer reading for a week will find most of what a team of three would. The cheap end fails when the question is bigger than the code: whether the app can pass a security review, whether an acquirer is buying what it thinks it is, whether the agency left you licensing exposure. Those questions need the staffed product, and the staffed product is where the floors sit.
Where code-audit firms cluster
The listed supply is spread thin, but it leans east in a way most tech services do not. The eight largest city clusters hold only 18.3% of the category between them, so none of them is where most firms are. Four of the eight are in Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw with 17 listings, Kyiv with 10, Lviv with 9 and Bucharest with 6. That is 42 listings, or 8.6% of the category. Ahmedabad (16), London (11), New York (11) and Lahore (10) make up the rest of the eight.
Warsaw, Kyiv and Lviv do not appear among the twelve cities that rank in the top eight of the most Edverise categories, a list led by New York, London and Toronto. For an audit buyer that is a practical point. A shortlist drawn only from the cities that dominate the build categories leaves out a visible part of the audit supply, and filtering the category by city is the quickest way to put a Warsaw or Lviv firm next to a London one.
The industries these firms most often list are information technology (234 firms), financial services (207) and medical (195). Those counts overlap, because one firm lists several industries, but they tell you where to look first if your codebase handles payments or patient data.
Technical due diligence cost before an acquisition
Technical due diligence cost depends on whether the review covers only the code or the whole engineering operation. A code audit answers whether the software is sound. Technical due diligence asks a buyer's question: whether the product, the team and the licenses are worth the price being paid for them. The deliverable is written for an investment committee, not for the next developer.
Kolonell labels its own figures as estimates: a flash review at EUR 8,000 to 12,000 over 5 to 7 days, a standard audit of code, dependencies, security, licenses, infrastructure and team at EUR 15,000 to 22,000 over 2 to 3 weeks, and a deep audit adding penetration testing, cloud review and GDPR at EUR 22,000 to 30,000. Variant Systems prices investment-grade due diligence at $10,000 to $20,000+, and says investor-facing reports take more careful language and more review rounds. Bolder Apps puts an enterprise audit with HIPAA, PCI-DSS and SOC 2 mapping at $50,000 to $80,000+.
One line item belongs in almost every acquisition review: a software bill of materials, which CISA describes as "a nested inventory, a list of ingredients that make up software components." Kolonell sells a license scan producing one as a separate option at EUR 2,500 to 5,000 over 2 to 4 days. If an agency built your product on open-source packages, the SBOM is how you learn what licenses you inherited.
Code audit vs penetration test cost
A penetration test and a code audit overlap less than their prices suggest. A pen test attacks the running application from outside; an audit reads the source. Bolder Apps prices a penetration testing add-on at +$15,000 to $40,000 on top of an audit, and Kolonell estimates a web application and API test at EUR 6,000 to 15,000 over 5 to 10 days.
The standard most security reviewers work from argues against buying the pen test alone. OWASP says verifying its requirements may need access to documentation, source code, configuration and the people who built the system, especially at Level 2 and Level 3, and it strongly encourages source-code-led "hybrid" testing over a traditional outside-in pen test. Its Application Security Verification Standard 5.0.0 was released on 30 May 2025.
The ASVS also gives you a sentence to put in the brief. OWASP says most applications should be striving for Level 2, which means meeting around 70% of its requirements, and that a buyer can require software to meet a stated level and ask the seller to prove it. Two warnings come with it: OWASP does not certify any vendor, so an "ASVS certified" badge is not OWASP's, and merely running an automated tool is not enough to verify a requirement.
How to get code audit quotes you can actually compare
The reason two quotes differ several times over is usually the brief, not the firms. Send every bidder the same one page, and the spread narrows to the part that reflects real differences in skill. The same discipline applies to any build quote, as the guide to comparing software development quotes sets out.
- State the size. Number of repositories, languages, rough lines of code, and whether there is a mobile app as well as a web app. Variant Systems names codebase size and the number of languages as its first two cost drivers.
- Write the questions you need answered. "Can a new team keep building on this?", "Is customer data exposed?", "What would a buyer's reviewer find?" Each question adds days, and the quote should say which ones it covers.
- Name the standard. Ask for security findings against ASVS Level 2, and for process findings mapped to the NIST Secure Software Development Framework, which NIST published in February 2022 partly to give buyers and suppliers a shared vocabulary.
- Specify the deliverable. Findings ranked by severity, a remediation plan with rough effort per item, an SBOM, and a summary a non-technical founder can read. Bolder Apps describes its deliverable as prioritized findings by severity with remediation recommendations, not a pass/fail grade.
- Ask for a fixed fee. An audit has a defined end, so it suits a fixed price better than most software work. The trade-offs are in the piece on fixed price vs time and material contracts.
- Separate the audit from the fix. Ask each bidder whether it would bid on the remediation. If it would, consider hiring it for one and someone else for the other.
When a $5,000 budget is enough
A $5,000 budget fits a red-flag review of a small, single-language codebase, and little more. Fora Soft's red-flag band starts at $4,000 and runs to $12,000, and Kolonell's flash review starts at EUR 8,000, so even the cheap product can exceed $5,000 at some firms. On the supply side, 263 listed firms state a minimum at or below $5,000, enough to get three bids. Ask for a short written list of the worst risks and what each would cost to check further, and treat that list as the scope for a second, larger audit only if it finds something.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a code audit cost?
A code audit costs anywhere from about $2,000 to $80,000 or more, depending on which product you buy. Published seller prices put a red-flag review at $4,000 to $12,000 and a full audit with a written report at $18,000 to $45,000 or $30,000 to $60,000. As of October 2026, 46.4% of firms listed on Edverise for this work state a $10,000 minimum or higher.
What is included in a code audit?
A full code audit usually covers architecture, security, performance, maintainability, test coverage and dependencies, and ends in a report of findings ranked by severity with a remediation plan. Bolder Apps lists those six areas for its main tier, and Fora Soft describes a 30 to 60 page report. A red-flag review is far narrower: Fora Soft's is a one-page summary.
How long does a software code audit take?
A software code audit takes roughly one week for a red-flag review and two to five weeks for a full audit. Fora Soft gives about five business days for its red-flag summary and 10 to 14 days with two auditors for a full audit. Bolder Apps gives 3 to 5 weeks for its main tier and 4 to 6 weeks with compliance mapping.
Is a code audit the same as technical due diligence?
A code audit is not the same as technical due diligence, though one is usually inside the other. A code audit judges the software. Technical due diligence also weighs the team, infrastructure, open-source licenses and scalability for someone deciding whether to buy the company. Kolonell's standard acquisition audit, for example, covers code, dependencies, security, licenses, infrastructure and team, and its own estimate is EUR 15,000 to 22,000.
Can I get a code audit for under $5,000?
You can get a code audit for under $5,000, but it will be a red-flag review or a focused audit of a small codebase, not a full audit. Variant Systems prices a focused audit at $2,000 to $5,000. As of October 2026, 161 firms listed on Edverise for code review state a minimum below $5,000, which is 32.8% of the category.
Do I need a penetration test as well as a code audit?
You need a penetration test as well only if the system is exposed to the internet and holds data worth stealing, which most products are. The two find different problems. OWASP recommends source-code-led hybrid testing over a traditional pen test, so ask your auditor to quote both together rather than buying them from two firms that never compare notes.
Put the brief in front of more than one audit firm
Before you accept either quote, write the one-page brief above and send it to at least three firms, including one whose stated minimum sits below your budget and one whose minimum sits above it. You can filter firms listed for code review and technical audits on Edverise by minimum project size and city, then read each profile for what it says it delivers. Listings are compiled from public information, so ask each firm for a sample report before you sign.