Penetration testing small businesses can actually afford.

The pentest market was built for enterprises. An average engagement runs around $18,000; common ranges are $5,000–$20,000 and large scopes reach $100,000+. Even the firms that advertise to small businesses typically floor their pricing at $3,500–$4,000 — because their cost structure includes scoping calls, project managers and consultancy day rates before a single test is run.

The result is predictable: small businesses either skip testing entirely, or buy a sub-$1,500 “pentest” that is, in most cases, a rebranded automated scan with a logo on the PDF. Neither option actually tells you whether a person could break into your site.

Here’s the part the quotes never mention: attacks on small businesses are overwhelmingly automated and opportunistic. Bots sweep the internet for exposed admin panels, reused passwords, unpatched software and broken access control. You don’t need a three-week enterprise engagement to defend against that — you need the small-site attack surface tested by a person who knows what those attacks look like. That is a scope that can honestly be productized, so we did.

The honest framing: a good freelancer can be excellent value — if you can vet their skill, agree a real scope and get a usable report, which is exactly the part most small businesses can’t judge. A traditional firm is the right call when compliance demands it. Our $49 audit is a productized small-site scope, not an enterprise engagement — it wins when what you need is the real-world attack surface of a small website tested by a person, at a price that doesn’t require a budget meeting.

The scope is the web attack surface a small business site exposes to the internet — the things automated attacks probe first and automated scanners understand least:

• Authentication — login and password-reset flows, brute-force exposure, session handling, credential-stuffing resilience.
• Access control — can one user reach another’s data? Can a logged-out visitor hit admin functionality? Scanners can’t answer this; a person can.
• Injection — SQL injection, cross-site scripting and template injection in your forms, search and URL parameters.
• Security headers & TLS — CSP, HSTS, frame protection, cookie flags and certificate hygiene.
• Exposed services & files — forgotten subdomains, open admin panels, backup files, debug endpoints and leaked configuration.
• Business logic — the flaws unique to your site’s flows (checkout, quotes, bookings) that no scanner has a signature for.

Every finding is verified by hand before it goes in the report — no false-positive dumps. Testing only begins after you verify domain ownership and we record an Authorization to Test, so everything stays legal and above-board. The deliverable is a written report with severity, evidence, plain-English impact and exact fix steps — good enough to hand to a developer, or to an enterprise customer doing due diligence.

We’d rather lose a sale than oversell a scope. A productized small-site audit is the wrong tool when:

• A compliance framework mandates it — PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001 or a customer contract that names an accredited testing firm. Our report documents real testing, but it isn’t a substitute for a mandated engagement.
• Your application is large and custom — dozens of user roles, complex workflows, years of bespoke code. That genuinely needs weeks of testing, and honest firms charge accordingly.
• Your risk lives outside the website — mobile apps, extensive public APIs, internal networks or cloud infrastructure need their own scoped engagements.

If your situation looks like one of these, a $5,000–$20,000 engagement from a reputable firm is money well spent — and we’ll tell you so before taking yours. For everyone else running a small business website, the choice was never really “$49 vs $18,000.” It was “$49 vs nothing” — and nothing is what attackers are counting on.