Penetration Testing Cost

Penetration Testing Cost

A Guide to Budgeting for Your Cybersecurity Investment 

How Much Does a Penetration Test Cost? 

The cost of a penetration test can vary widely, depending on your organization’s size, scope, testing approach (black-box, gray-box, or white-box), and overall environment complexity. A small business with limited digital infrastructure may spend a few thousand dollars, while large enterprises with multiple applications, cloud environments, and complex networks may see costs range into tens of thousands of dollars. 

While price is an important consideration, it’s essential to view a penetration test as an investment in risk reduction and overall security maturity, compliance, and brand protection rather than a simple line-item expense. 

Tip: Compare multiple providers and verify whether deliverables include exploitation attempts, proof-of-concept evidence, and post-remediation testing, as these components vary widely and affect costs. 

At CyberGuard Advantage, many clients come to us after discovering their previous provider delivered only automated scans labelled as “pen tests”. The pricing only made sense once they understood what real manual testing includes.

What Impacts the Cost of a Penetration Test? 

Several factors influence penetration testing costs.

1. Scope of the Test

The number of in-scope targets (i.e., systems, applications, APIs, and devices) included in the assessment will directly impact pricing. Larger scopes require more time and resources.

2. Complexity of the Environment

Organizations with hybrid environments, such as cloud infrastructure, SaaS platforms, and legacy systems, require more intricate testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. Complex network segmentation, IAM policies, and containerized or serverless architectures can also increase testing hours.

3. Type of Penetration Testing Methodology

Different penetration testing methodologies have different costs: 

• Network penetration tests often involve external and internal scanning and may include credentialed testing, lateral movement, and privilege escalation attempts. 

• Web application and API tests need specialized skills for detecting injection attacks, misconfigurations, authentication flaws, and vulnerabilities in an application’s business logic. 

• Mobile application tests require simulating real-world scenarios across multiple devices and operating systems, including assessing API interactions, anti-tampering mechanisms (certificate pinning, jailbreak/root detection controls, etc.), and secure storage. 

• Red team engagements are the most comprehensive and simulate real attacker behavior, making them higher in cost, especially when they include long-duration campaigns, social engineering, endpoint evasion, and threat-intel-driven objectives. 

• OT/ICS tests (Operational Technology/Industrial Control Systems) evaluate PLCs, SCADA systems, and industrial network segments. These engagements are typically more expensive due to strict safety constraints, limited testing windows, and the need for specialized OT-security expertise and tooling. 

• LLM application testing (Large Language Model) evaluates prompts, guardrails, model access controls, data leakage risk, and how susceptible the model is to jailbreaking. Costs depend on model architecture, integrations (i.e., chatbot, agent, RAG pipelines, etc.), and whether adversarial prompting or model alignment testing is required.

4. Frequency and Duration

One-off tests are less expensive than ongoing or periodic testing, but sacrifice continuous security coverage for cost savings. Some businesses invest in quarterly or semi-annual assessments to proactively detect emerging vulnerabilities, which can entail reduced pricing for multi-engagement contracts or rolling assessments.

5. Vendor Experience and Reputation

The expertise and reputation of the penetration testing provider affect pricing. Highly skilled testers with compliance and regulatory knowledge often charge more, but the insights they deliver provide greater assurance. 

Vulnerability Scanning vs. Penetration Testing 

It’s important to understand the difference between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing, because the cost structure can also be different, and the two are often mistakenly used interchangeably: 

Vulnerability scanning

Automated tools enumerate systems in the environment and identify potential weaknesses in those systems. These scans are faster and less expensive but may produce false positives as they do not validate exploitability, assess business impact, or consider chained attack paths. Scans also vary in quality depending on whether they are authenticated or unauthenticated, how they are configured, and what preparation is made in the environment before the activity. 

In another scanning done by CyberGuard Advantage, a client was overwhelmed after a vulnerability scan returned over a thousand findings. A penetration test revealed that only four issues were actually exploitable. 

Penetration testing

Skilled security experts simulate real-world attacks to validate vulnerabilities, exploit weaknesses, and provide actionable remediation steps. Penetration testing is more thorough and provides greater assurance, but also higher costs, because it assesses exploitability, prioritizes findings based on impact, examines lateral movement, and evaluates real security controls rather than just configuration states. 
 

The ROI of Penetration Testing 

Investing in penetration testing is about more than just compliance; it’s about protecting your data, reputation, and revenue. By identifying and addressing vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them, organizations can: 

• Reduce the risk of costly data breaches by validating real attack paths, not just theoretical vulnerabilities. 

• Avoid regulatory fines and penalties by demonstrating due diligence, validation of controls, and remediation tracking. 

• Increase customer trust and confidence through independent verification that security controls actually function under stress. 

• Streamline remediation and improve internal security practices by highlighting root causes, misconfigurations, system issues, and gaps that vulnerability scans alone fail to identify. 

Fact: The cost of a single breach can be exponentially higher than the investment in a comprehensive penetration test, especially when considering the costs of incident response, digital forensics, data recovery, reputational damage, and operational downtime. 

How CyberGuard Advantage Can Help 

At CyberGuard Advantage, we provide tailored penetration testing services across networks, web applications, APIs, mobile apps, and cloud environments. Our team combines automated tools with hands-on expertise to deliver actionable insights that strengthen your security posture and help you meet compliance requirements.