Website accessibility audit cost: a straight breakdown

“What does an accessibility audit cost” doesn't have one answer, because “audit” covers three quite different products: a manual expert audit, an overlay widget subscription, and automated continuous monitoring. They cost different amounts, cover different ground, and produce different evidence. Here's the straight comparison.

Manual expert audit: $20,000-60,000, or $100-250 per page

A manual audit means accessibility specialists, often working with disabled testers, going through your site by hand: testing keyboard navigation, screen reader behaviour, form logic, and cognitive load in ways no script can. Full-cycle engagements typically run $20,000-60,000, or you can scope it per page at roughly $100-250 per page for a smaller site or a partial review.

This is worth commissioning when the stakes or complexity justify the price: large organisations with many templates and components, businesses already in legal proceedings or responding to a demand letter, and complex applications — multi-step checkouts, booking flows, dashboards — where automated tools can't exercise the actual interaction paths. It is not usually the right first purchase for a small site that hasn't done any accessibility work yet.

Overlay widgets: $49+/month

Overlay widgets sit at the cheap end — from $49 a month — and promise automated compliance from a single script tag. The market has largely rejected this promise. More than 800 businesses using overlay widgets have been sued despite having one installed, because an overlay changes what renders in the visitor's browser without touching the underlying code that automated legal scans actually read. The European Commission's position is that overlays alone do not achieve EAA compliance. And in April 2025, the FTC fined overlay vendor accessiBe $1 million for deceptive compliance claims. Cheap, in this case, has turned out to be expensive: you pay the subscription and still carry the legal exposure.

Automated monitoring: from €29/month

Automated monitoring tools, like AccessProof, start from €29 a month and work differently to an overlay: instead of masking issues at runtime, they scan your actual code and content and report what they find, on a recurring schedule. Be clear-eyed about what this does and doesn't cover. Automated scanning detects roughly 30% of WCAG success criteria — it's a starting point and a source of continuous evidence, not a substitute for a full audit. Some things genuinely need a human: whether a keyboard flow makes sense end to end, whether alt text is actually meaningful rather than just present, whether the cognitive load of a page is reasonable. What automated monitoring gives you that the other two options don't is a standing, dated record of scans over time — exactly the kind of evidence a good-faith accessibility statement should be built on.

Comparing the three

A sensible sequence for an SMB

For most small and mid-sized businesses, the sensible order is to start cheap and specific, then scale up only if the risk profile calls for it. Run a free scan first to see where you actually stand. Fix the priority issues the scan surfaces — the highest-risk, most common problems first. Publish an accessibility statement that honestly reflects your conformance status and the scan behind it. Keep monitoring continuously, so the statement stays current and you build a dated record of effort. Only commission a manual audit once your size, complexity, or legal exposure actually justifies the $20,000+ price tag — for example, once you're past the micro-enterprise exemption threshold, or once your application has interaction paths a scanner can't exercise.

Start with the free 5-page scan at accessproof to see which of these next steps actually applies to you.

This article is general information about EU accessibility law, not legal advice.