How Much Do Code Audit Services Cost?
Key Factors & Pricing

A source code audit can take less time than a new feature sprint or more than a month of engineering. It’s very difficult to estimate how expensive it can get without knowing all the factors that make up the cost of code audit services.

This guide explains what drives the pricing across audit types and services and the exact things you should track to estimate your budget. Then, we’ll give a few pieces of advice on how to find the most fitting auditor for your codebase.

Let’s start with the code audit service types.

A software code audit is an in-depth assessment of your software’s performance, security, reliability, readability, and regulatory compliance. In other words, audits show if your product is fast, stable, safe, and easy to update.

Audits are different from everyday reviews that happen during development because they assess the full surface of the product. That takes time, so software code audit services are usually completed in a series of stages:

Architecture and boundaries:

Mapping the major parts of the software, including how modules (separate functional pieces) interact and depend on each other, and who owns each component. Auditors also evaluate whether the architecture can scale, maintain performance under load, and update without breaking.

Internal code structure:

Assessing the code for inefficient or risky patterns, such as duplicate logic, deprecated or overly long functions, confusing branching, dead code, and overly complex responsibilities.

User interface and user experience:

Examining the front-end (user-facing) parts of the app, design choices, compatibility with devices and browsers, and interface behavior that can slow users down or cause errors.

Testing and quality control:

Checking whether tests are relevant and fully cover critical features (like business logic, authentication, data processing, etc.) and if the CI/CD pipeline catches all problems before merging.

Data and error handling:

Examining how the system validates user input, enforces permissions, logs errors, and recovers from failures, so small issues do not corrupt data or break software functionality.

Code security:

Assessing code, libraries, and selected services for exploitable weaknesses, such as unsafe credentials handling, exposed secrets, injection risks, and missing safeguards around sensitive actions.

Build, deployment, and configuration:

Checking if your software build and release processes are reliable, repeatable, consistent across environments, and whether teams can roll back (revert) safely if a release causes problems.

Third-party integrations:

Scrutinizing how the external services and libraries interact with your codebase, including whether they introduce bottlenecks or vulnerabilities to your software.

Documentation:

Reviewing the setup documents, architecture summaries, maintenance guides, and inline comments in the source code to ensure they’re accurate, easy to understand, and up to date.

Companies must conduct code audits to expose structural flaws in their code. That includes checking and fixing:

• Security vulnerabilities that can lead to breaches or compliance violations
• Recurring issues that throttle developers’ productivity
• Poor design decisions that accumulate in technical debt
• Failures that may cause system-wide outages

Audits help inform business decisions, too. For example, they help you calculate project budgets, plan modernization, validate a vendor’s work, or get an understanding of the company you’re trying to acquire.

Given the comprehensiveness of code audits, it’s important to understand what’s involved. That way, you can forecast the time and expenses required and allocate budget accordingly.

The cost of an audit largely depends on the length of time it takes, since auditors generally charge on an hourly rate. The following factors affect the total number of hours needed, and, subsequently, the costs.

Audit Type and Scope

The scope of work and boundaries define what your auditor should review. A simple security audit might scan for known vulnerabilities, leaked keys, and obvious risky patterns. But deeper assessments can combine multiple audit types and involve more manual testing, edge case checks, and provide evidence for the development team to act on.

Codebase Size and Complexity

Lines of code, components, services, endpoints, libraries, and integrations all affect the scope of work. Complexity increases due to dependencies, unclear boundaries, mixed responsibilities, and poorly documented functions. Plus, shared systems often multiply effort because a mistake in one code line can affect other services, which auditors must track and document.

Existing Technology Stack

Programming languages, frameworks, cloud services, and management tools make a difference. Older or proprietary platforms, especially if they’re poorly documented, will take longer to review. Additionally, auditors will need more time to set up their testing tools in heavily customized stacks for the results to be more reliable.

Compliance Requirements

Auditors must understand which security and privacy guidelines to apply, identify where those rules touch your configurations, and then verify that the controls work consistently. For instance, a code audit for a retail data platform may need extra checks around customer data access. And more privacy-focused industries, like healthcare, will require auditors to trace regulated data in its entirety, verify every permission gate, and check every logging point.

Location of the Audit Company

Rates for source code reviews can differ drastically across markets. That’s because pricing often depends on the team’s language proficiency, communication overhead, and their overlap with your working hours. You should also factor in that some regions have more professionals who are used to working with specific stacks or niche technologies.

Urgency and Turnaround

Tight deadlines limit the vendor’s ability to find appropriate specialists, plan the scope of work, and test the codebase. This can force audit firms to pull senior auditors from other projects or hire parallel reviewers, raising the total cost of code audit services.

Auditor’s Experience

Seniority incurs a higher hourly rate but delivers more value. For example, our audits are conducted by experienced security professionals who can find root causes faster, test more scenarios to catch hidden gaps, and write clear remediation tips in reports. This can reduce the total audit spend by cutting the rework that often follows a shallow review.

Code audits can involve various types of reviews based on the company’s specifications. For instance, DevCom offers three audit options that you can mix based on your needs and budget, as shown in the table below.

The scope of an audit may have to shift depending on what’s uncovered in the process, which is why it’s important to know how to estimate the costs for yourself.

There’s no surefire way to know how much an audit will cost, but the following practices can help you make a reasonable forecast based on the available information.

• Define audit objectives as simply as possible: Try writing a single sentence that describes the successful outcome. For example, “Confirm that payment APIs enforce permissions correctly” is enough to keep the audit from drifting into unrelated areas.
• Pick the right type of audit: Specify what type of audit you want and what aspects of your software it should assess.
• Start with a quick review: You should scan your codebase to highlight high-risk areas and critical vulnerabilities at the very start, as these can increase the scope of your audit.
• Map the scope into countable units: Turn the scope into simple counts you can discuss with any vendor, such as repositories, services, user roles, integrations, environments, and endpoints (places where the system accepts requests).
• Break the audit into activities: Once you have divided the audit into units, it will be easier to estimate what expertise each assessment will need and how much time it will require (based on your team’s skill level).
• Include remediation and retesting: The estimated cost of a code audit should include time to fix critical findings and time for the auditor to verify the fixes. Otherwise, the audit ends with a report but no confirmed improvement.
• Confirm boundaries and inclusions: Confirm in writing the total scope of the audit, how the amount of work can change, and how this adjusts the pricing. This can keep your budget in check when an audit uncovers extra issues (which usually happens).
• Assign key decisions owners: Name the people who approve scope changes, grant access, answer auditor questions, and sign off on completion.
• Separate internal and external teams: Track how much time your team spends helping the external auditors, so you don’t pay for the same work twice.
• Monitor and adjust the work: Track actual hours spent by activity, compare them to the plan, and adjust scope or resourcing before overruns grow rampant.

There’s one more way to keep your estimates realistic, and it involves working with reputable audit companies.

An independent third party can assess your system more objectively than the team that originally wrote the code. The key is choosing an auditor who focuses on issues that meaningfully affect your product, not one who delivers a long list of low-impact observations.

Use the factors below to evaluate vendors, compare proposals, and choose the right fit for your needs.

• Pick a provider familiar with your tools, front-end and back-end frameworks, database standards, and cloud platform.
• Look at the auditor’s track record to see if they have worked on or optimized software similar to yours.
• Make sure the auditor’s team understands your industry-specific regulatory rules, security standards, and the risks they bring.
• Determine if the audit process fits you. This includes learning what they do and in what succession, what inputs they need, which tools they run, how they verify claims, and how they produce reports.
• Confirm that the company respects your confidentiality and intellectual property, and that they have sufficient security and access control mechanisms.
• Establish if the company provides post-audit support, remediation, and retests, or if it can optimize your source code based on the findings.
• Watch out for red flags, such as providers that cannot describe their audit process, share relevant examples of similar work, or provide concrete estimates.
• Compare proposals or rates from different auditors by scope, deliverables, exclusions, pricing models, and estimated rates.

DevCom can review your codebase and deliver a detailed audit report with clear, prioritized recommendations. If needed, our team can also help implement the improvements identified during the audit.

More importantly, we can give you a realistic cost estimate for software code audit services, combined with all the exclusions and potential risks. If you’re interested, contact us to learn about our process.