ROI calculator

Find out how much your AI penetration test will cost

Compare the cost of human-led manual penetration testing with AI penetration testing. Enter what your program looks like today to see what full coverage actually costs.

Your program today

Apps

Pentest frequency

Average hours per test

Hourly rate (USD)

Change any number. Up to 5 apps. Totals update as you type.

Your year of coverage

days between runs

Point-in-time pentests

Each report starts going stale
the day it lands

per year

Novee AI pentest

Continuous, with every fix retested

0 days · continuous testing

per year

Day of the year

Last manual pentest

Last Novee test

Or hover the timeline to scrub through the year.

Total savings

back in your budget

With Novee: 0 days. Testing never stops.

At this size manual testing costs less per year, but leaves days untested between runs.

Talk to an expert

Manual = apps × tests per year × hours × hourly rate. Novee = $40,000 per year, flat, for up to 5 apps.

Manual penetration testing has reached its limits

Manual offensive security work sits in the middle of a quadrant of problems:

AI-driven acceleration of development.

“Vibe-coded” applications ship with more vulnerabilities, and the attack surface changes faster than point-in-time security reviews can keep up.

“Shifting left” doesn’t scale: human pentesters cannot sit inside the CI/CD. The level of depth provided by a pentest far exceeds what an embedded tool can find, but it can’t stay apace with development cycles.

Tool and vendor acquisition is too slow.

Budgets get set once a year, the time to obtain vendors is high, and tool acquisition and integration are both costly and slow.

Outside penetration testing delivers expertise, but at the expense of logistical delays. The contracting and scoping and sign-off processes can take weeks, all while exploitable risk remains hidden within.

Threat actors are embracing AI without reservations.

Attackers can now find complex vulnerabilities and exploit them at scale. The spread of new open-weights models, and the ease of credential theft, make access to advanced AI easy and cheap.

The time to find and exploit vulnerabilities has collapsed from days to minutes, and the time to pivot from entry to exfil has shrunk.

Internal resources are limited.

The talent pool is small, and expert staff time for validation is limited.

The effect compounds; the more time customer engineers spend validating vulnerabilities passed to them via scanner exports or bug bounty submissions, the less time they have to build.

Manual pentesting introduces compounding costs outside the contract value

Point-in-time testing carries downstream costs that may not reflect on an invoice, but add up to lost value.

The coverage and signal gap	A pentest is a snapshot. The moment the report lands it starts going stale, and the acceleration of deployment means new features roll out far faster than a manual testing cadence can capture.
The open loop	Budget for a point-in-time pentest buys you findings, not fixes. Periodic testing reports often do not offer stack-specific remediation, nor automatic retesting to prove the risk is actually closed.
The triage burden	A report is only the handoff. Someone still has to read the whole thing and make sense of every finding, then split the validation work across one or more engineers before a developer is ever asked to fix anything. That triage can eat hours of engineering time, just to decide what in the report is even worth acting on.
The retest bill	Confirming a fix held means running the engagement again, and that round costs time on both sides, yours and the vendor’s. Plenty of vendors charge for the retest and the post-fix validation on top of the original engagement, so the invoice you signed is rarely the invoice you end up paying.
The scoping cycle	Each vendor run carries its own scoping and statement of work, with sign-offs to clear before anyone touches your environment, and that overhead repeats for every test you commission.

How Novee does it

What we test	Complex business logic, authorization, and chained attack paths, with coverage across OWASP WSTG, API Top 10, and AI Testing Guide.
Where we test	Internet-Facing Apps. Tested directly over TLS from Novee’s fixed IP ranges, including web applications, APIs, mobile backends, MCP servers, and AI applications and agents. Internal Apps. Reached through the Novee connector using an outbound-only encrypted tunnel, with no inbound firewall rules required.
How we test	Isolated runtime per assessment. Real browser, HTTP tooling, PoC execution, and private workspace. Guardrails enforce scope, testing windows, rate limits, credentials, custom headers, and pause controls. AI models are securely routed through Novee’s pluggable model architecture. Safety that is continuously evaluated. Tests are safeguarded by both deterministic “hard” guardrails and “soft” guardrails that prohibit dangerous actions on the part of the testing agents. Ahead of the run, all testing actions are independently judged by a “guardian” agent for safety. Safety mechanisms are continuously evaluated, including tripwire scenarios that verify agents stop at prohibited actions.
What you get	Validated findings within 6 to 72 hours. All findings come with detailed, stack-specific remediation guidance.
What happens next	We retest every fix and keep testing on your schedule or with every release.