A client paid us $3,000 for a technical audit. We found issues that would have cost them $25,000+ in the first year alone.
Here's the math.
The Setup:
Client inherited a SaaS platform from a previous dev team. It worked, but they had no visibility into what was under the hood. They wanted to scale but weren't sure if the codebase could handle it.
We ran our 19-category technical audit. It took 5 days.
What We Found:
1. Three Critical Security Vulnerabilities
We identified SQL injection risks, hardcoded API keys in the repo, and missing authentication on admin endpoints.
→ Estimated breach cost (per IBM Security report): $150,000+ → Our fix: $8K in remediation → Net savings: $142K+ in avoided risk
2. Performance Bottleneck
The platform was making 40+ database queries per page load. This was causing cloud costs to spike as traffic grew.
→ Current excess cloud spend: $800/month → Projected annual waste: $9,600 → Our optimization: $4K to implement query caching → Net savings: $5,600/year
3. Missing Database Indexes
Key queries were doing full table scans. Page loads averaged 12 seconds under load.
→ Estimated customer churn from slow performance: 10-15% (industry avg) → Client's annual revenue: $500K → Churn cost: $50K-$75K/year → Our fix: $2K to add indexes and optimize queries → Net savings: $48K-$73K/year
The Math:
→ Audit cost: $3,000 → Total year-one savings: $25,600 (conservative estimate) → ROI: 753%
That doesn't include the avoided security breach, which alone could have been catastrophic.
This is why we charge for audits. Free assessments are superficial. Paid audits go deep. We look at 19 categories: security, performance, scalability, code quality, architecture, dependencies, and more.
You're not paying for a document. You're paying for risk mitigation and cost avoidance.
When was the last time you audited your codebase?
#TechnicalAudit #SoftwareDevelopment #SaaS #Security #ROI #CodeQuality
→ scopeforged.com
Philip Rehberger Founder, ScopeForged scopeforged.com
