How Much Does a UX Audit Cost in 2025? (And When You Are Overpaying)

If you just want the short answer: in 2025 most UX audits cost somewhere between $1,000 and $25,000, with enterprise scale or heavily regulated products reaching $30,000 to $75,000. Lightweight heuristic reviews for a small site can sit at the lower end, while full usability testing, accessibility, and complex flows push you to the higher end.

That is the headline number. The more important question is what you are actually buying for that UX audit cost and whether you are getting fast, actionable insight or a very expensive PDF that quietly dies in a folder called "To Read".

Let us unpack what drives UX audit pricing, what different types of audits look like, and where a tool like Krux fits as a faster, more scalable alternative when you do not have 15k and six weeks to spare.

The Quick Answer: Typical UX Audit Cost Ranges

You will see a lot of variation, but as a rule of thumb:

Basic UX heuristic audit for a simple site or small app

• Often $1,000 to $5,000
• Usually 1 expert, limited number of screens, checklist style findings

Comprehensive audit for a SaaS or e-commerce product

• Often $8,000 to $25,000
• Heuristics, flows, some light user testing, maybe competitor review

Enterprise or regulated domain audit

• Often $30,000 to $75,000+
• Multiple flows, complex permissions, accessibility, stakeholder workshops, usability testing

Accessibility only audits

• Often $1,000 to $1,800 for focused checks

Those numbers are not random. They reflect a mix of methodology, talent, risk, and overhead. If you know what is inside that price, you can very quickly tell whether a quote is reasonable or ridiculous.

What Are You Paying For When You Pay for a UX Audit?

Type of Audit

Not every UX audit is created equal. Broadly, you are paying for one or more of these:

Heuristic evaluation

• A UX expert reviews your product against well-known principles like Nielsen's heuristics
• Relatively low cost
• Fast to run
• Good for surfacing obvious usability issues

Cognitive walkthrough

• The auditor walks specific tasks step by step, asking things like: Will the user know what to do here? Will they see this control? Does this label make sense in context?
• More time intensive, more aligned to real workflows, and a better fit for SaaS and complex tools

Usability testing with real users

• This is the heavy lift version. You recruit 5 to 10 real users, run recorded sessions, and analyse all the qualitative and quantitative data
• High insight
• High cost
• Lots of time for recruitment, moderation, and analysis

Accessibility and performance analysis

• In 2025, performance and accessibility are part of UX, not nice add-ons
• Audits that include Core Web Vitals, mobile optimisation, and WCAG compliance require people who can speak both design and engineering, so the rates go up

The more your audit leans toward empirical testing and technical checks, the more hours and expertise are required—which pushes your UX audit cost higher.

Who Is Doing the Work

The same scope can cost 3x more or less depending on who actually does the audit.

Junior UX designer

• Focus: surface level issues, UI consistency, obvious friction
• Typical use: very small products or early sanity check reviews

Mid-level UX designer or researcher

• Focus: flows, user journeys, standard testing
• Good for typical B2C SaaS, onboarding, and core flows

Senior or principal designer or researcher

• Focus: tying UX problems to business metrics, roadmap, and strategy
• They will tell you which problems actually move conversion, retention, and revenue

You are not just paying for hours. You are paying for quality of judgment. A senior designer may cost more per hour, but needs fewer hours to identify the 10 issues that matter, instead of 80 small cosmetic nits.

Domain Expertise

Auditing a simple content site is not the same as auditing:

• A FinTech trading platform
• A medical records system
• A complex B2B SaaS workflow

In those worlds the auditor needs to learn:

• Regulations and compliance
• User roles and permissions
• Edge cases and failure modes
• The real world context of use

That learning time is a real cost. It is one reason specialists in FinTech, HealthTech, and enterprise software often charge a 20 to 50 percent premium compared with generalists.

Who You Hire: Agencies vs Freelancers vs Productized Services

Provider type is one of the biggest drivers of UX audit pricing.

Design Agencies: The "Safety Tax"

Agencies tend to sit at the top of the pricing spectrum:

• Hourly rates often $100 to $150, with specialist work at $200 to $400
• Project fees starting around $1,000 to $5,000 for very small audits
• $8,000 to $25,000 for comprehensive audits of a SaaS or e-commerce product
• $30,000 to $75,000+ for enterprise, multi-product or multi-market engagements

Why so high?

Because you are not only paying for the person doing the audit. You are also paying for:

• Account management and project management
• Non-billable discovery time
• Sales and business development
• Office, ops, and overhead

Depending on the agency, 40 to 60 percent of the fee can go to overhead rather than hands-on design hours. The upside is stability, a team behind the work, and a reduced risk of people disappearing mid-project. The downside is obvious: cost and speed.

Freelancers: Cheaper But Riskier

Freelance UX designers and researchers typically charge:

• $30 to $60 per hour for junior talent
• $60 to $100 per hour for mid-level talent
• $120 to $200+ per hour for senior experts, especially in the US and Western Europe

You can find great people at good rates, especially in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. The challenge is:

• Quality variance: portfolios can be hard to compare
• Vetting time: you or your PM now have to review candidates, interview them, and check references
• Availability churn: good freelancers are often booked; if they get a bigger client, your timeline slips

On paper, the UX audit cost looks lower. In reality, you can end up adding thousands in hidden internal time to manage and direct the work.

Productized Audit Services

Over the last few years, a middle tier has appeared: fixed scope, fixed price audits for specific problems, such as:

• Shopify store UX reviews
• Email journey audits
• Checkout funnel reviews
• Accessibility mini audits

These often sit around $1,000 to $1,800. They are efficient because the provider runs the same playbook over and over. Predictable, yes, but also less tailored. If your flows are unusual or your business model is non-standard, you may get a generic checklist that misses the nuance.

Hidden UX Audit Costs That No One Puts on the Quote

The invoice you receive is rarely the true UX audit cost. There are several hidden line items most teams forget to account for.

Internal Time to Hire and Manage

With freelancers in particular, you have to budget for:

• Time spent sourcing candidates
• Reviewing portfolios
• Running interviews and test tasks
• Legal and procurement overhead to onboard new vendors

If a product manager spends 15 to 20 hours on this, that is easily $1,500 to $3,000 of internal cost on top of whatever you pay the freelancer.

Then there is the management tax: weekly check-ins, clarifying context, answering questions, and translating findings into tickets. None of that shows up as a line item on the UX audit quote, but it hits your roadmap all the same.

Opportunity Cost of Delay

Bad UX does not politely wait while you negotiate contracts. If your product has a leak in the conversion funnel worth $10,000 a week, and your audit takes 8 weeks from first email to final presentation, you have effectively paid an additional $80,000 in lost revenue while waiting for answers.

In that context, quibbling over whether an audit is $5,000 or $7,000 is almost comical. Speed to insight matters as much as day rate.

The Shelfware Problem

A huge hidden UX audit cost is wasted work.

Common pattern:

1. Agency delivers a thick 50-page PDF
2. Product team skims it once
3. Someone says "we should ticket this"
4. The sprint calendar fills with other priorities
5. Audit goes to die in Notion, Dropbox, or Google Drive

You have paid for the audit, but not for change. The format of the deliverable is part of cost. Reports that do not map directly to your backlog or design system cost you more time to digest and implement.

When Classic UX Audits Are Worth the Cost

All of this may sound like an argument against traditional UX audits. It is not. There are plenty of cases where a full human-driven audit is the right move:

• You are redesigning a mission-critical flow such as payments, onboarding, or claims
• You operate in a regulated space where compliance and liability matter
• You have multiple teams and stakeholders who need a shared outside perspective to unblock decision-making
• You are about to invest a large amount of engineering time in a new direction and want to derisk it with deep user research

In those cases, the UX audit cost is insurance against bigger, more painful costs later.

What you do not need is a 20k, 8-week process every time you want to sanity check a new settings flow or run through a prototype of your onboarding.

This is where smarter, lighter-weight alternatives become very attractive.

Enter Krux: Compressing UX Audit Cost, Time, and Admin

Krux sits in a different category to agencies and freelancers. It is essentially an AI-powered UX audit tool that lets you run expert-style reviews on demand, at subscription pricing.

Instead of:

• Sourcing a freelancer
• Explaining your product from scratch
• Waiting weeks for a report

You:

• Record or upload a video walkthrough of your flow, prototype, or even a wireframe
• Let Krux analyse it against established UX heuristics and flow patterns
• Receive a structured report with prioritised issues, copy suggestions, flow simplifications, and roadmap opportunities

What Krux Gives You for the Price

Within a single analysis you get:

• A clear overview of what the flow is meant to achieve and where it is currently falling down
• An overall UX score out of 100, broken down into areas such as clarity, error prevention, discoverability, visual hierarchy, and first-run experience
• A ranked list of P0, P1, and P2 fixes with:
  • The issue
  • Why it matters
  • The exact change to make
• Tables of suggested label and microcopy improvements, with before and after text you can copy straight into your design tool or codebase
• Identification of missing states and subflows like error states, loading states, and recovery paths you have not covered
• Flow simplification ideas and sensible defaults that can remove unnecessary clicks and decisions
• A section on complex task support, pointing out where users will need comparison tools, summaries, or extra guidance
• A list of future opportunities (for advanced plans), so you can see beyond quick fixes to mid-term and long-term bets

In human terms: it does the heavy thinking a good senior designer would do during a review, but in minutes, not days, and at subscription pricing that is closer to a single freelancer hour than a full agency day.

How Krux Changes the UX Audit Cost Equation

Let us compare rough orders of magnitude.

A traditional comprehensive UX audit might look like:

• $8,000 to $20,000 for a mid-sized SaaS product
• 4 to 6 weeks from initial conversation to final report
• One-shot output you may or may not fully implement

Krux pricing:

• Strategist plan: $7.99 per month
  • 10 UX analyses per month
• Innovator plan: $12.99 per month
  • 25 UX analyses per month
  • Extra roadmap opportunity insights

Even if you ran only 5 serious audits a month, you would be paying a few dollars per audit rather than thousands.

That does not make human experts obsolete. It simply means you can:

• Use Krux for fast, frequent, high-coverage audits of flows as you iterate
• Reserve expensive human-led audits for the genuinely strategic, high-risk problems

Instead of "Do we spend 15k on a UX audit this quarter or not" you get "We run Krux on every major flow as it changes, and every so often bring in human experts for deep dives when needed".

Speed and Scalability

Because Krux works from video walkthroughs, it is input agnostic:

• High fidelity Figma prototype
• In-progress staging build
• Live product with dummy data
• Even a rough wireframe

If the steps are clearly described, Krux can analyse the experience. That means:

• Designers can sanity check flows before handoff
• Engineers can verify implementation after shipping
• PMs and founders can quickly validate UX on new features without waiting for the next research cycle

Speed and consistency also solve another UX audit cost: organisation-wide scalability. Instead of one team getting an audit this quarter, anyone with access can use the tool.

How Should You Think About UX Audit Cost Now?

If you are planning a UX audit in 2025, here is a simple way to frame it:

Estimate Your Revenue at Risk

How many users are dropping off or churning because of obvious friction or confusing flows?

Decide Where You Need Depth vs Frequency

• Few high-stakes flows that need deep human research
• Many day-to-day flows that need regular critique and iteration

Use classic audits for the former, Krux for the latter:

• Agencies or specialist freelancers for the big strategic bets
• Krux for rapid UX audits of the rest of your product surface area

The honest answer to "How much does a UX audit cost" is:

Anything from under $100 equivalent per month with a tool like Krux, up to $75,000 or more for a large traditional engagement.

The better question is:

How do I spend the least to reliably stop UX-driven revenue leaks and keep my product feeling sharp?

If you want the old school path, get a few quotes from agencies and freelancers and budget accordingly. If you want a faster, cheaper, and more scalable way to run UX audits on everything you ship, try running your next flow through Krux first.

At worst, you get a detailed set of recommendations that helps you brief a human expert more clearly. At best, you realise you can cover most of your UX audit needs with a tool that costs less than lunch.