What a Cybersecurity Assessment Actually Costs a Small Business, and What You Get for It

Ask three vendors what a cybersecurity assessment costs and you will get three answers an order of magnitude apart. That is not price gouging. It is the honest signal that "assessment" is one word stretched over four very different products, and the only way to buy well is to know which one you are actually paying for.

Here are the real numbers. For a small business under 50 employees, published 2026 pricing lands between $3,000 and $15,000 for a risk assessment, with a basic vulnerability scan at $1,000 to $2,000 and a full penetration test running $5,000 to $30,000. A second firm breaks it the same way by company size: $3,000 to $10,000 for a small business, $10,000 to $50,000 for a mid-sized one, and $50,000 to $150,000-plus at the enterprise end, with roughly $15,000 as the baseline for a 100-employee company checked against a formal framework. The numbers cross-check. The spread is inside the definition, not the market.

The four things sold under one name

Sort the quotes by what the work actually is and the confusion clears up.

A vulnerability scan is an automated tool pointed at your systems. Cheap, fast, and useful, but it produces a list of known weaknesses, not judgment. One pen-testing firm rates automated-only scans as "low to mixed" quality because they rely entirely on the scanner and throw false positives that a human has to sort out.

A risk or gap assessment measures your setup against a real standard, flags what is missing, and hands you a prioritized roadmap. This is the one most small businesses actually need first.

A penetration test pays a human to break in and prove impact, chaining flaws the way a real attacker would. That firm bills certified testers at $200 to $400 an hour, which is why a serious pen test starts around $15,000 and a comprehensive one crosses $75,000. You are buying labor and skill, not a report template.

A compliance audit validates you against SOC 2, HIPAA, or a similar framework, and regulated industries add 35 to 45 percent to the bill for the documentation burden.

Four products. One word. That is where the ten-x confusion comes from.

The case for spending up, then the case against

The honest steelman for the expensive end is real. If a client contract, a cyber-insurance renewal, or a regulator requires a penetration test or a SOC 2 audit, a scan will not satisfy them, and buying the cheap thing means paying twice. A pen test also finds classes of problems a scan cannot: business-logic flaws, chained exploits, the ways a real intruder actually moves. If you handle health records or process payments, that depth is not a luxury.

But for most small businesses that is not the first dollar to spend. The failures that sink companies are boring: no MFA, an unpatched laptop, a backup nobody ever tested, a domain anyone can spoof. You do not need a $30,000 red team to find those. You need a scoped review against a framework, and then the discipline to fix what it surfaces. Buying a penetration test before you have basic hygiene is paying a surgeon to tell you to eat vegetables.

There is also a floor under all of this that costs nothing. CISA runs a free vulnerability-scanning service that continuously checks your internet-facing systems and sends weekly reports ranked by severity, and the FTC has recommended it to businesses outright. Enroll in that regardless of what else you buy. A paid assessment that ignores the free baseline underneath it is not scoped honestly.

How to buy it

Match the depth to your actual risk, and make the vendor scope before they quote. If a firm hands you a flat five-figure number before asking what you are protecting, you are buying their package, not your assessment.

That is the whole idea behind how we run a cybersecurity assessment at Mojo. We score against the CIS Controls, look at identity, endpoints, email, backups, and configuration, the places risk actually hides, and hand you a prioritized list ranked by risk and effort. Findings you can act on, not a panic-priced PDF. If you want a straight read on where you stand before the questionnaires and insurers force the issue, tell us what you are protecting and we will scope it to your real risk.