What does a WCAG (accessibility) audit cost?
The short answer
A manual accessibility audit is quote-only. We could not find a published price for one — anywhere, from any vendor we could reach, on 25 Sep 2026. The vendors who do this work price it as days of human effort, so the number depends on how many pages and templates are in scope, and they want to talk to you before they give it. Anything you read that quotes a single figure for “a WCAG audit” is either about a tool, or it is guessing.
What is published is the automated end of the market: checkers, per-domain accessibility platforms, agency SEO suites and reporting tools. Those numbers are below, each one with the page it came from and the date we read it.
Our own place in this: $49, one-off, for one automated pass over one page and the finished report as a document — emailed to you in full, with a private link that opens it so you can read, print or save it as a PDF.
The vendors whose prices we could not find
Published before the numbers, because a price table that leaves out the hard cases is a price table you shouldn't trust. These four are among the best-known names in accessibility testing, and none of them would tell us a price:
Silktide
It says so itself: the page states it prefers to talk to you first and that pricing is based on the size of your organisation, with a 12-month minimum. There is no figure to quote.
silktide.com/pricing/Deque (axe)
No prices published: the axe DevTools pricing page lists Pro/Bundle plans with only “free trial” and “contact”, and there is no axe Monitor pricing page — /axe/pricing/ answered 404.
www.deque.com/axe/devtools/pricing/Siteimprove
No published pricing: /pricing/ redirects to the vendor's homepage.
www.siteimprove.com/pricing/AudioEye
Its pricing page was unreachable from our network (HTTP 403), so we never read it. We are not going to guess at a figure we never saw.
www.audioeye.com/pricing/
We are not claiming these vendors have no price — only that no price is published where a buyer can read it. A quote you have to ask for is a real product; it is just not evidence anyone can check.
Published prices we could read: automated accessibility tools
| Vendor | What it is | Published price (as published 25 Sep 2026) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| WAVE (WebAIM) | Automated accessibility checker, with a full issue list | Free tool. API: 100 free credits (1 credit ≈ 1 page), then $0.04/credit (250–999, $10 minimum), $0.03 (1,000–9,999), $0.025 (10,000+). | wave.webaim.org/api/ |
| Pope Tech | Automated accessibility testing | Free forever tier covering 25 pages. From $25/mo (50-page tier, billed annually) or $30/mo monthly; $225/mo (500 pages, annual) or $270/mo monthly; $400/mo advanced tier. | www.pope.tech/websites/pricing |
| accessiBe | Accessibility overlay and monitoring | Micro $59/mo or $490/yr (5k visits/mo); Growth $179/mo or $1,490/yr (30k); Scale $479/mo or $3,990/yr (100k). | accessibe.com/pricing |
| UserWay | Accessibility overlay | Pro $490/yr; Pro Plus $1,190/yr; two further tiers $1,490/yr and $2,490/yr. Monitoring add-ons: 100 pages $990/yr, 500 pages $4,490/yr, 1,500 pages $10,990/yr. | userway.org/pricing/ |
| AccessibilityChecker | Per-domain accessibility scanning | Per domain: Lite $69/domain/mo (annual) or $89/mo; Starter $119 or $149; Growth $249 or $299 (25/100/500 URLs). | www.accessibilitychecker.org/pricing/ |
Read the shape of this group: free checkers at the bottom, per-page API pricing in fractions of a cent to four cents a page, and per-domain platforms at $69–$119 per domain per month. A platform is a subscription per site with monitoring; an API credit is one page checked once. Nobody here sells a one-off document.
Published prices: the site-audit and SEO tools agencies already pay for
| Vendor | What it is | Published price (as published 25 Sep 2026) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Site crawler used for technical audits | €245/licence/year (1–4), €235 (5–9), €219 (10–19), €209 (20+). Free tier crawls 500 URLs. (Currency as displayed on the page; we did not capture a USD price.) | www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/ |
| Sitebulb | Site audit tool with client-facing reports | Tiers rendered $18/mo and $42/mo, a higher tier listed as “From $125/month”, extra user $11/mo. | sitebulb.com/pricing/ |
| Ahrefs | SEO suite including Site Audit | Starter $29/mo; higher tiers $129 / $249 / $449 per month; extra users $40 / $60 / $80 per month; Enterprise $1,499/mo (annual commitment). | ahrefs.com/pricing |
| Semrush | SEO suite with site auditing | Monthly figures observed $139 and $199 (billed annually $117.33 and $165.17); a third tier $248.17/mo billed annually. | www.semrush.com/pricing/ |
| Search Atlas | SEO suite with agency tiering | Starter $79/mo ($950/yr); Growth $159/mo ($1,910/yr); agency tier $319/mo ($3,828/yr); Enterprise from $999/mo. | searchatlas.com/pricing/ |
| SEOptimer | Automated SEO reports, incl. white-label | DIY SEO $29/mo ($21.75/mo annual); White Label $39/mo ($29.25/mo annual); Lead Generation $59/mo ($44.25/mo annual). | www.seoptimer.com/pricing |
| SEO Site Checkup | Automated site reports for agencies | Basic $39/mo ($29/mo yearly); Webmaster $69/mo ($49/mo yearly); Professional $129/mo ($99/mo yearly), labelled “For SEO agencies”. | seositecheckup.com/pricing |
These are the tools an agency already has a card on file for. Most include some accessibility checks, and most are subscriptions — the cheapest credible tiers start in the high tens of dollars a month, and the agency tiers run into the hundreds.
Published prices: the reporting layer
| Vendor | What it is | Published price (as published 25 Sep 2026) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| AgencyAnalytics | Client reporting dashboards | Pricing-page meta description: “pricing plans start at just $25 per month”; the page body states $20 USD per client/month billed annually. The tier table did not finish rendering for us, so the plan names are unknown. | agencyanalytics.com/pricing |
| DashThis | Client reporting dashboards | Individual $54/mo ($44/mo annual); Professional $164/mo ($139); Business $324/mo ($279). | dashthis.com/pricing/ |
Worth noticing where the money in this market already goes: agencies pay monthly for the document they hand a client, and yearly or per-page for the checks that go into it. That is the gap our $49 one-off single-site report sits in — and also the risk of it, because nothing in these tables is a comparable single-report price. We have no sales evidence for that yet, and we are not going to dress one up.
Why a manual audit costs more than a tool
- It is days of human work. Someone has to use the site: navigate it by keyboard, listen to it with a screen reader, check contrast on the rendered page, read the content, and then write up what they found page by page. A tool costs a fraction of that because it reads markup; a person costs days because they read the experience.
- Scope is the price. A five-page brochure site and a thousand-page multi-template platform are both “an audit”. That, more than anything, is why the number is quote-only — the vendor cannot price it without knowing the site.
- It is the only thing that can see the rendering. Colour contrast, focus order, announcements, motion, whether the error messages make sense: none of it is in the markup an automated checker reads.
- You are paying for judgement, not just findings. A person can tell a client which problems matter for their users and what to do about them; a checker can only tell you what it saw.
It is worth being blunt about the limit of the expensive option too: a manual audit is human work with human scope, and it does not by itself guarantee legal compliance either. Whether a site meets a legal standard is a judgement about the law as well as the site.
What $49 buys here — and what it doesn't
What you get
- One page, one automated pass over the page as it is served right now.
- Accessibility, security header, SEO, speed and a capped sample of the page's own links.
- Every finding with its evidence, a severity, and a plain-English fix.
- A prioritised “fix these first” order.
- The finished document, emailed to you in full, with a private link that opens it printable or saveable as a PDF.
- Which checks could not run, stated rather than hidden.
What you don't
- Not a manual audit: no keyboard, screen-reader, contrast or content testing.
- No account, no dashboard, no public report page, no report archive.
- No monitoring or scheduled rescans — you start every check yourself.
- No white-label option: the report carries the audited URL and our name.
- No monthly plan to buy — $49 is one-off, for one site.
- Not a certification or a guarantee of WCAG, ADA or any other compliance standard.
And then there is the thing a table cannot show you: the document itself. read the complete sample audit report — a real, unedited run on a public site — before you decide whether it is worth $49 to you.
How to price it for your client
Our $49 is our cost, not your price — what you charge for an audit is your call, and this page is not going to invent a number for you. What we can give you is the anchors we found and the trap to avoid:
- The anchors, from the tables above. Per-domain accessibility platforms $69–$119/domain/mo; an agency-tier automated report tool $129/mo; a white-label report tool $39/mo; a client-reporting dashboard $25–$324/mo. If a client is used to paying monthly for someone else's dashboard, a one-off fee for a report on their own site is not a hard sell.
- Charge for what you actually do. If you hand over a document we produced and add a page of your own commentary, that is what you are selling — your reading of the findings and your plan for them. That is real work and it should be priced as such.
- Never price a compliance promise. Do not sell the report as the thing that makes a site compliant. It is a readiness audit on the delivered markup, it says which checks could not run, and the things it cannot test are exactly the things a client will ask about.
- Sell the next step while you are there. The report is the evidence for a manual audit and for the remediation work. Bundle the free check, the report, the fixes and a follow-up check into one line item rather than selling a one-off document and disappearing.
Sources, and why this page is dated
Every price above was read on the vendor's own page on 25 Sep 2026, and the URL is in the table next to it. There is no search-volume data, no survey and no estimate anywhere on this page, and no price has been rounded, averaged or adjusted. Prices change — some of these pages displayed prices in euros, or as annual-billing rates, or without plan names. Check the vendor's page before you quote a client.
- wave.webaim.org/api/
- www.pope.tech/websites/pricing
- accessibe.com/pricing
- userway.org/pricing/
- www.accessibilitychecker.org/pricing/
- www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/
- sitebulb.com/pricing/
- ahrefs.com/pricing
- www.semrush.com/pricing/
- searchatlas.com/pricing/
- www.seoptimer.com/pricing
- seositecheckup.com/pricing
- agencyanalytics.com/pricing
- dashthis.com/pricing/
- silktide.com/pricing/
- www.deque.com/axe/devtools/pricing/
- www.siteimprove.com/pricing/
- www.audioeye.com/pricing/
Our own price is published on this site in one place and quoted on Stripe's checkout page: $49, one-off, one site. We email your report within one working day of your payment. If we can't produce your report, you get your money back in full.
FAQ
Is WCAG compliance required?
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice, and we will not say yes or no. Whether accessibility obligations apply to a particular site depends on the jurisdiction, the sector, how the organisation is funded and the contracts it is under — and the rules change. That is a question for a solicitor or a compliance adviser who knows your client's circumstances, and anything we wrote about it here would be us guessing at law. What we can say without qualification: a document that lists the findings that were actually found, with the evidence, and states which checks could not run, is useful to whoever does answer that question. No automated report settles it.
So what does an accessibility audit cost?
A manual audit is quote-only — priced as the days of human work it takes — and we could not find a published price for one from any vendor we could reach on 25 Sep 2026. The automated tools and agency suites do publish prices, and they are in the table above with the URL each figure came from. Our own automated report is $49, one-off, for one page.
Why publish the vendors whose prices you couldn't find?
Because a table of numbers with the hard cases quietly left out is the thing that gets quoted back at you. Four of the biggest names in this market publish no readable price at all, and saying so is the reason to believe the rows that do have figures — every one of those was on the vendor's own page, on the date shown, and none of them is an estimate.
Are these prices still right?
We read them on 25 Sep 2026 and every row says so. Vendors change prices, tiers and currencies without notice, and some figures above were displayed in euros, in annual-billing terms, or without the plan names we would have liked. Check the vendor's own page before you quote a client, and treat our table as a starting point for reading, not as a current quote.
Does $49 cover a WCAG audit?
No, and nothing on this site will tell you that it does. $49 buys one automated pass over one page and the finished document, emailed to you in full with a private link that opens it. It is the cheap first pass that finds the mechanical problems and gives you the evidence to argue for the human audit — not a substitute for it, and not a certification of anything.
Ready to see the cheap end of the market for yourself? Run the free accessibility check on any public page, or read the site audit report template to see what the document you would be paying for contains.
Get the full report by email — $49
We email your report within one working day of your payment. If we can't produce your report, you get your money back in full.
What this audit is — and isn't
These are automated checks on the page as delivered to our scanner at the moment it ran. Accessibility findings come from the markup only — we do not test colour contrast, keyboard use or screen-reader behaviour — so this is a readiness audit and a prioritised to-do list, not legal advice and not a guarantee or certification of WCAG, ADA or any other compliance standard.
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and we do not say whether any accessibility law applies to your client or what it requires.