A UX audit costs anywhere from $35 to $15,000, and the median advertised price across 20 published offers is $500. That median comes from a ClapBack analysis of 20 published rate cards (12 providers, July 2026), not from an agency blog with a retainer to sell. The $35 gig and the $15,000 engagement are both real. They are barely the same product.
How much does a UX audit cost by provider type?
Marketplace gigs run $35 to $500, productized services $95 to $3,179, and published agency rate cards $1,650 to $15,000 as of July 2026. Here is the whole market in one table, with the agent tier included because that is where we sit and you deserve the comparison.
| Tier | Advertised price | Turnaround | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI tools (Contentsquare, Attention Insight) | $0-$49/mo | Instant | Heatmaps, session replays, automated screenshot feedback |
| Agent-based audit (ClapBack) | From $49, one-time | Minutes | Ranked findings as Jira or Linear tickets: severity, cited rule, annotated screenshot, effort estimate |
| Marketplace gigs (Fiverr) | $35-$500 · median $188 | Set per gig | One reviewer’s walkthrough, written or video notes |
| Productized services (Roastd, Uxitt, CheckMyUX, Oddit) | $95-$3,179 · median $1,114 | 48 hrs to 30 business days | Annotated report, Figma redesigns, top tiers add user tests |
| Agency rate cards (Miquido, Scenic West) | $1,650-$15,000 | 1 to 6 weeks | Heuristic evaluation or walkthrough, wireframes, user testing, competitor review |
Methodology, since nobody else shows theirs: we counted every single-audit price published on a provider’s own page or gig listing in July 2026. Euro prices converted at 1.10, Scenic West’s $6,000 to $15,000 range entered at its midpoint, sale prices counted as advertised. Sort the 20 numbers and the middle lands at $500; strip out the Fiverr gigs and the professional median is $1,775.
Two offers got cut, and the reasons matter to you as a buyer. Roastd’s $2,500 unlimited-roasts year is a subscription, not a single audit. And Convergine advertises “Complete UX Audit Services for $1,440” in its page title while the same page’s FAQ prices the full audit “starting at $10,000.” Contradictory numbers do not make the dataset. Read rate cards all the way down.
What the spread buys is depth. At $35, one Fiverr seller walks your landing page and sends notes. At $500, Uxitt analyzes a single page in depth and redesigns 1 or 2 sections in Figma. At $3,179, CheckMyUX’s Deep Dive covers your entire product with an accessibility review, 3 user tests of 10 participants each, up to 3 competitor reviews, up to 10 wireframes, and a month of support. Same word, audit. Three different jobs.
Now the caveat agency blogs skip: this is a survey of sellers who publish prices, and sellers who publish prices are the cheap end. Baymard and most large firms quote on request, so they are invisible to an advertised-price median. When agency blogs claim audits cost $3,000 to $25,000 or $10,000 to $75,000, they are describing that hidden segment. Both numbers are true. They describe different markets.
Why do agencies quote $10,000 for a UX audit?
Agencies price hours, not documents: published estimates budget roughly 50 hours for a focused audit and 200 or more for enterprise scope. That 50-hour figure is ArtVersion’s own line item: $10,000 to $15,000 buys about 50 hours, $20,000 to $35,000 buys 100 to 175, and enterprise work starts at 200 hours. At Krux’s published agency bands of $100 to $150 per hour ($200 to $400 for specialists), the math checks out. The price is labor, and the labor is real.
Miquido’s rate card shows the same coupling of method and money. An expert review runs about $1,650 and a week. A heuristic evaluation, about $3,300 and 2 weeks. A cognitive walkthrough, about $7,150 and 3 to 6 weeks. More rigor, more hours, bigger invoice.
The most expensive line item is testing with real humans. Recruiters charge $100 to $300 per qualified participant, and even a small moderated round with 5 users runs $415 to $1,680 out of pocket plus 32 to 48 researcher hours, per NN/g. The incentive alone for an hour-long interview averages $85.
A $15,000 audit is not an upsell on a $500 audit. It is a different product wearing the same name.
Scenic West’s $6,000 to $15,000 audit includes unmoderated testing with 5 to 10 users, heatmap and session-recording analysis, and competitor review. Baymard’s full-site audit is a 120+ page report over 17 to 25 business days with a public guarantee: positive ROI or the audit is free. If your question is “why do users fail here” rather than “what is broken,” that spend can be entirely rational.
What are the hidden costs of a UX audit?
Your own hours and the calendar: human audits take 48 hours to 30 business days, and someone still has to turn the report into work. The published turnarounds:
- Roastd: video review in 48 hours
- Uxitt: 5 to 10 days
- CheckMyUX: 7 to 30 business days by tier
- Baymard: 17 to 25 business days
- Oddit: under 4 weeks, plus 2 to 4 more for implementation. Plan on 6 to 8 weeks from purchase to shipped fixes.
Your hours are the second invoice. You brief the auditor, provision test accounts, sit the kickoff and the walkthrough, then attend the findings call. CheckMyUX bundles a 1-hour findings call and up to a month of support into its top tier because handoff is genuinely work. And weigh the wait against your funnel: illustrative arithmetic, but if the leak you are auditing costs $1,000 a week, a 30-business-day turnaround bills you roughly $6,000 in lost conversions before the report even lands.
The third cost is the quiet one. A 30-page PDF fixes nothing until someone converts it into tickets, sizes them, and defends them in sprint planning. The survival plan is in how to turn UX findings into tickets devs actually fix. And while you wait, the leak you bought the audit for keeps running.
Is a UX audit worth it?
The honest answer: the evidence is dated or vendor-sourced, so treat any precise ROI percentage on an audit sales page as marketing. Here is what actually exists. NN/g’s classic ROI study found usability KPIs improved 135% on average across 42 before-and-after redesign pairs, but the data is 2003-era, self-submitted, and excludes 5 outliers. NN/g’s own follow-up reported the average falling to 83% and said so plainly. A vendor publishing its declining numbers is a vendor you can trust with a methodology.
Baymard says clients implement 21 or more improvements per audit and backs it with a falsifiable public guarantee: positive ROI or the audit is free. Still a vendor claim, but one you can hold them to. Their broader checkout research documents roughly 70% cart abandonment, and that is the honest case for audits in general: the problems are real even when the ROI slogans are not.
“Every $1 invested in UX returns $100.” If an audit pitch opens with that stat, close the tab.
The line is attributed to Forrester in hundreds of agency posts, yet no publicly verifiable primary source exists. Chase the citation and it dead-ends in other blogs citing other blogs. We cite it here for exactly one purpose: to flag it.
The defensible math prices your problem, not the vendor’s promise. Illustration with made-up numbers: say your product books $600,000 a year through a funnel converting at 3%. Each percentage point of conversion is worth roughly $200,000 a year, so a $500 audit needs to move almost nothing to pay off, and even a $15,000 one needs a fraction of a point. Run that arithmetic with your own revenue before reading anyone’s pricing page, ours included.
Which UX audit should you buy at your stage?
Match the spend to the decision: $0 tools for triage, $49 agent audits for a ranked fix list, four figures for real user research. Even sellers admit fit beats price: Groto’s pricing guide says a $2,500 freelancer with deep PLG SaaS experience “will out-deliver a $15,000 generalist agency nine times out of ten.” Full disclosure before the matrix: we sell the $49 tier at ClapBack, so weight our take accordingly. And do not read what follows as agency-bashing. When the deliverable is research with real users, the agency tier is the only one that actually delivers it.
Two of those paths have full write-ups: the DIY method is the founder’s UX audit checklist, and if agent-based audits are new territory, what an AI UX audit is covers how the agent works and where it stops. Whatever tier you buy, insist on ticket-shaped output. An audit you can paste into Jira gets implemented; an audit you admire in Figma gets archived.