Services / How Much Does a Secure Code Review Cost?
Pricing

How Much Does a Secure Code Review Cost?

Code review pricing depends heavily on codebase size, language complexity, and whether you want a one-time audit or ongoing involvement.

Key Takeaways
  • Codebase size and language complexity are the primary cost drivers, not team size.
  • Legacy codebase reviews are common and often surface higher-priority findings than new-code review alone.
  • Ongoing support tends to cost less per-issue-caught over time than repeated one-time audits.
  • CI/CD integration work is usually scoped and priced separately from the review itself.

What Drives the Price

The primary cost driver is the size of the codebase and number of repositories in scope — more lines of code and more distinct systems both mean more reviewer time. Language and framework complexity matters too; some ecosystems have more mature tooling and known patterns to check against than others.

Whether you want a one-time audit or ongoing review as code changes is a major structural decision that affects pricing, as does whether CI/CD integration work is included as part of the engagement.

  • Lines of code and number of repositories in scope
  • Language and framework complexity
  • One-time audit vs. ongoing review as code changes
  • Whether CI/CD integration work is included

One-Time Audit vs. Ongoing Support

A one-time audit gives you a snapshot of current risk across your codebase — useful for understanding where you stand today, particularly before a major release or compliance deadline.

Ongoing support catches issues as they're introduced, continuously, which tends to cost less per-issue-caught over time than repeated one-off audits, since problems are cheaper to fix when they're caught close to the moment they're written rather than accumulated and discovered later.

What a Review Actually Looks Like

A thorough review combines automated static analysis with manual review by someone who understands both security and your specific application's business logic — automated tools alone tend to miss logic flaws that require human judgment to spot.

Questions
Can you review an existing legacy codebase, not just new code?

Yes — existing codebase reviews are common, and often surface higher-priority findings than reviewing new code alone, since legacy code frequently predates current security practices.

Do you review specific languages, or is coverage general?

Coverage spans the common modern languages and frameworks; if you're working in something unusual or highly specialized, it's worth confirming fit during scoping.

Related Reading

Have a Question We Didn’t Cover?

Email Our Team