Pricing for BFSG audits and remediation — fixed figures instead of day rates

For most companies an accessibility project is a one-off undertaking without any benchmark. Anyone who has never commissioned a WCAG audit cannot judge whether 12 or 30 person-days are appropriate. That is precisely why time-and-materials billing is unfavourable here: it shifts the entire estimation risk onto the party that knows the least about the audit process. We reverse that. After a short, free review of your website we define the audit scope — which page types, which processes, which documents — and name a price that does not change as long as the scope does not change. You budget one figure, not a range.

The second reason is about substance. An audit billed by the hour has an economic incentive to take a long time. An audit at a fixed price has an incentive to be systematic and reproducible. Our methodology therefore follows a fixed sequence: automated analysis, manual evaluation of all success criteria, practical tests with assistive technologies, prioritization by severity. That sequence grew out of more than 50 projects (project experience) and can be planned — otherwise we could not name a fixed price. Automated tools alone detect only 30 to 50 percent (WebAIM 2024) of the barriers actually present; the plannable but indispensable part is the manual review, and exactly that part sits inside the fixed price.

What a fixed price does not mean: that every project costs the same. A shop with a configurator, customer accounts and three payment routes requires a different testing effort than a corporate website with twelve pages and one contact form. The packages below cover the standard case. Anything beyond that we calculate after a review — also as a fixed price, just with an individually determined figure.

Not every project starts with a full audit. Some companies have already tested and only need the legally sound statement; others must deliver a stack of forms as accessible PDF documents at short notice, or provide a landing page in easy-to-read language. All of the following services can be booked individually and come with fixed prices.

Accessibility is not a state that is reached once and then preserved. Every change to a website can introduce new barriers: a new content element without alt text, a theme update that removes the focus outline, a newly embedded widget without keyboard access. An honest price statement therefore has to include the part that arises after the project. It is considerably smaller than the initial effort, but it is not zero.

Concretely that means two things. The re-test after remediation is included in the complete package. Beyond that we recommend, first, ongoing monitoring from €49 net per month covering automated scans, alerts on regressions and maintenance of the accessibility statement. Second, a full re-audit roughly every twelve months and additionally after every major relaunch, system change or new feature area. In premium monitoring from €349 net per month this annual full audit is already included; otherwise you book it as a regular WCAG 2.2 audit from €2,480 net.

Anyone who wants to reduce follow-up costs permanently invests in their own editorial and development teams. A team that knows what a useful alt text looks like and why a heading level should not be skipped produces considerably fewer new findings. That is exactly the purpose of our training: it moves accessibility from after-the-fact correction into the ongoing process — and thereby moves budget from repair into creation.

How the investment in an audit can be assessed in business terms is covered in the article on the cost and return of an accessibility audit. Whether you are affected at all as a micro-enterprise is explained in the article on the micro-enterprise exemption. And when a measure may be documented as a disproportionate burden is described in the article on Section 17 BFSG. Which service sits behind which price is set out on the services page; general questions are collected on our FAQ page.