Category pricing: autonomous and AI-assisted testing · Pricing guide
AI Penetration Testing Cost
Two things make this category hard to price-compare: most vendors quote rather than publish, and the ones who publish use different units — per test, per target, per month, per credit. This page collects what is actually published, explains the three models, and gives you the arithmetic to compare a quote against them.
Last verified: 2026-08-14
AI Penetration Testing pricing at a glance
The Three Models, and Who Each One Suits
Per test is the easiest to understand and the easiest to under-buy: you pay for an assessment, you get a report, and the next release is untested. It suits teams that ship a few times a year, or need one report for a specific deadline. XBOW publishes $4,000 for lightweight applications and $8,000 for complex ones; Intruder's AI pentesting add-on starts at $3,500 per test.
Per target or per asset scales with your estate, which is fair and punishes untidiness — every stale sub-domain and every container image is a line item. It suits infrastructure-heavy environments and penalises teams with sprawling DNS they have never pruned.
Flat subscription decouples price from frequency, which is the point: if a test costs nothing marginal, you run it on every deploy instead of rationing it. Penetrify starts at $100 a month with retests included. The trade is that a subscription has to actually cover your surface, so check what a plan includes before comparing it with a per-test figure.
How to Compare a Quote Against a Published Price
Convert everything to annual cost at your real release cadence. A $4,000 per-test vendor tested quarterly is $16,000 a year for four snapshots. A $100-a-month subscription is $1,200 for continuous coverage but no certified tester's signature. A quote-only vendor at $30,000 a year has to justify the difference in depth, human involvement or coverage — and it sometimes can.
Then add the two costs nobody quotes: triage time, and retesting. A vendor whose findings need heavy validation is charging you in engineering hours, and one that bills to verify its own fix is charging twice for one finding. PCI DSS 11.4.4 requires retesting, so if you are in that scope it is not optional value.
Finally, price the requirement rather than the product. If a contract names third-party manual testing with a named tester, no automated platform satisfies that clause at any price, and the honest budget is continuous testing plus one human engagement rather than an argument about which replaces which.
Why So Few Vendors Publish
Quote-based pricing is not automatically a bad sign — genuinely variable scope is hard to list honestly, and enterprise procurement expects negotiation. But it does shift information to the seller, and in this category the shift is large: buyers routinely report multiples of difference on comparable scope.
Search Console tells us buyers notice. Queries like "xbow pricing" and "cobalt pen testing pricing" carry real volume, and one of the most common shapes is asking whether a vendor publishes prices at all. When you cannot get a number, ask for the unit and the drivers instead: what counts as a target, what triggers a tier change, what a renewal looks like after year one.
Published Pricing in This Category (2026)
Only figures the vendor publishes. Quote-only vendors are listed as such rather than estimated, because a made-up number would be worse than no number.
| Vendor / option | Published price | Model |
|---|---|---|
| Penetrify | From $100/month, retests included | Flat subscription |
| XBOW | $4,000 per test (lightweight), $8,000 (complex) | Per test |
| Intruder (AI pentesting add-on) | From $3,500 per test | Per test |
| Cobalt | Not published; buyer reports ~$1,800 per credit, ~$8,500 entry | Annual credits |
| Horizon3.ai NodeZero | Not published | Annual subscription |
| Pentera | Not published | Annual subscription |
| Traditional manual engagement | Commonly quoted $15,000-$50,000 | Per engagement |
XBOW and Intruder figures from their own pricing pages; Cobalt figures from procurement platforms and buyer reports, not from Cobalt. Checked August 2026.
What Our Own Pricing Assumes
We price flat because we think rationing tests is the actual problem: a per-test model makes every scan a small budget decision, and the decision usually goes against testing. From $100 a month with retests included, the marginal cost of testing this deploy is zero, which is the only way testing every deploy actually happens.
What that does not buy you is a certified human tester's signature, and we would rather say so on our own pricing page than let you discover it during a security review. Where a contract or auditor names manual third-party testing, budget one engagement a year on top.
The bottom line
Convert every option to annual cost at your real release cadence, then check two things the quote will not mention: whether retesting is included, and how much validation the findings need. Published prices exist — XBOW at $4,000-$8,000 per test, Intruder from $3,500, us from $100 a month — so a quote-only vendor should be able to explain what the opacity buys you. And if your contract names a certified human tester, price that separately rather than hoping an automated platform covers the clause.
Frequently asked questions
How much does AI penetration testing cost?
Published figures span two orders of magnitude because the units differ: XBOW charges $4,000 per test for lightweight applications and $8,000 for complex ones, Intruder's AI pentesting add-on starts at $3,500 per test, and Penetrify starts at $100 a month with retests included. Most other vendors quote rather than publish.
Is AI penetration testing cheaper than a manual pentest?
Per unit of coverage, substantially — a manual engagement is commonly $15,000 to $50,000 for one point-in-time assessment. What it does not include is a certified tester's attestation, so if a contract names manual third-party testing the comparison is not like-for-like.
Why do most vendors not publish prices?
Partly genuine scope variability, partly information advantage. Buyers report large differences on comparable scope, which is why asking for the unit and the drivers — what counts as a target, what triggers a tier change, what renewal looks like — is more useful than asking for a discount.
What hidden costs should we expect?
Two. Triage time, if findings arrive unvalidated — that is a real engineering cost the quote will not carry. And retesting, if the vendor bills to verify its own finding, which is charging twice and is a requirement under PCI DSS 11.4.4 anyway.
Does per-test pricing ever make more sense?
Yes: if you ship a few times a year, or you need one report for a specific deadline, paying per test is cleaner than a subscription you will not use. The model becomes expensive precisely when it becomes useful — testing every release.