Pricing
What ADA Site Monitor Costs, and How the Quote Is Built
Accessibility monitoring pricing is quoted in writing, before any work starts, from a short scoping call. The price is built from your inventory, because the honest cost drivers are the number of websites, page templates, portals and documents you actually have. No published flat rate would be honest across a one-site town and a county with a dozen portals, so we do not publish one.
Request a written quoteSources
Key takeaways
- Initial assessment: quoted in writing after a scoping call, priced from your property inventory.
- Monthly monitoring: quoted together with the assessment, so you know the full cost before you start.
- Included in every engagement: a written quote, a written report reviewed by a person before it is sent, and the timestamped found-and-verified record.
What drives accessibility monitoring pricing?
Four things, all of them countable in the scoping call: how many websites and subdomains you have, how many distinct page templates they use, how many portals and web applications sit behind them, and how large the document libraries are. Population size alone does not predict any of those, which is why we scope before we quote.
In detail
A small city with one well-kept site and a modest document library is a small job. A school district with a site per school, two vendor portals and fifteen years of board minutes is not. Pricing from the inventory keeps the quote fair in both directions: nobody subsidizes anybody, and as long as the inventory is right, nothing turns up halfway through to change the price. The inventory itself is the first deliverable of the initial assessment, so the thing you are quoted on is also the first thing you receive in writing.
What is included in every engagement?
The scoping call
Free. We list your properties together, agree on the scope, and you get the written quote. No obligation follows from it.
A written quote, honored
Scope, price and delivery date in writing before work starts. If the inventory was right, the price does not move.
The timestamped record
Every engagement builds the dated found-and-verified history that documents your continuing accessibility effort.
Why is there no price list on this page?
Because a flat price would be wrong for many of the entities reading it, in one direction or the other. The W3C's own guidance on evaluating web accessibility includes its evaluation methodology, WCAG-EM, which makes a similar point: how much of a site has to be evaluated depends on its size, complexity and content. We would rather count what you have and put an honest number on it in writing. The quote that follows is the whole price for the scope it describes, and if the inventory was right, it does not move.
What happens on the scoping call?
We build the inventory together and you get a written quote from it. The call is free and carries no obligation, and you can walk away with the inventory alone.
In detail
You bring the properties you know about. We ask the questions that surface the ones you do not: the microsite a department stood up for a bond campaign, the payment portal a vendor hosts on its own domain under your name, the agenda archive nobody has opened in years. Each one either goes into scope or is written down as excluded, so there is no argument afterwards about what was measured. That agreed list is the only thing the price is built from, and it goes into the quote in writing.
Can the price change after we start?
Not for the scope you agreed. If the inventory was right, the price does not move. If the inventory itself changes, that is quoted again in writing before it takes effect.
In detail
Scope genuinely does change over a year of monitoring. A new department launches a site, an old microsite is retired, a vendor portal moves. The rule we work to is that a change is agreed and priced before it is monitored, never discovered on an invoice. The same applies in your favour: retire three properties and the next quote reflects it. What we will not do is quietly absorb a growing scope and present a larger number at renewal.
What are you actually paying for?
Machine time, processing and a written record. Running scans is not free to us, which is why inventory size and scan frequency are the two inputs that move the number most.
In detail
Each scan consumes real server time across every page and document in scope, and the results have to be processed, compared against the previous month and written into a report somebody can act on. That is the cost base, and it is why a monthly cycle costs less than a fortnightly one and why a thousand documents costs more than a hundred. What you are not paying for is remediation, because we do not do it, or a certificate, because no federal agency issues one. You are paying for an independent measurement and an unbroken dated record of it.
Could we not just do this in-house?
You can, and some entities should. The two things in-house testing cannot give you are independence and continuity, and those are usually the parts a reviewer asks about.
In detail
Free and paid scanners exist and a capable developer can run them. What tends to go wrong is not the testing, it is everything around it. The scan happens once, during the month somebody had time. The results live in a spreadsheet on one person’s drive. When that person moves on, the series breaks, and a broken series is a gap in the evidence rather than a record of effort. The other half is structural: a department testing its own website is in the same position as a vendor auditing its own build, which is the argument set out on our about page. In-house testing and independent monitoring are not competitors, and the strongest position is usually both.
Pricing questions
Yes. It is how we count the inventory we quote from, so it costs you nothing and commits you to nothing.
They are quoted together, as two line items in one written quote: the one-time initial assessment and the recurring monthly monitoring. You see both numbers before any work starts.
Yes. The assessment stands on its own as a written baseline. We will tell you plainly that a baseline ages as the site changes, which is what the monitoring is for, but the choice is yours.
Not by itself. The price is built from websites, templates, portals and documents. A large county with a tidy web estate can cost less to assess than a small district with a sprawling one.