What a VPAT costs
The going rate for a third-party ACR, what drives it, and the cheaper routes.
A third-party accessibility conformance report generally runs $1,850 to $4,450 per product. The range is wide because "a VPAT" describes anything from a template filled in off a scan to a full manual audit with a signed opinion.
What you are paying for at each level
| Route | Typical cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Your own time | The template is free. Budget days, not hours, for a first one — most of it spent working out what each criterion is asking. |
| Draft prepared for you | Hundreds | Evidence gathering and the document structure done, conformance calls left to your reviewer. What we sell. |
| Full third-party audit | $1,850–$4,450 | Manual testing by an auditor, findings, and a completed report attributed to them. What you need when the buyer requires independence. |
What drives the price up
- Number of distinct interfaces. A web app plus an admin console plus a mobile app is three evaluations, not one.
- Authentication and set-up. Test accounts with realistic data cost the auditor time before testing starts.
- Standards. The INT edition covering WCAG, Section 508 and EN 301 549 is more work than the WCAG edition alone.
- Turnaround. Deal-deadline work carries a premium, and the request usually arrives with a deadline attached.
The cost nobody quotes
An ACR describes a product at a point in time, and then you ship. We index 2254 published reports; 824 of them are more than two years old. A buyer who checks the date on a three-year-old document and sees your product has shipped since is reading a document that no longer describes what they are buying.
So the real figure is not the price of one report, it is the price of keeping one true. That is the case for the recurring option rather than a one-off audit every few years.
What we charge
We scan your product's public pages, collect the evidence, and hand back a draft ACR in the ITI structure: detected failures with the rule and the markup that triggered them, and a specific question for every criterion a machine cannot judge. Your reviewer makes the calls and signs it. $299 per product, or $249/month to have it re-run every quarter and on release.
When to pay for the full audit instead
If your buyer requires an independent third-party assessment, or the contract is large enough that you want an auditor's name on the document, buy the audit. We are not an accessibility consultancy and do not employ auditors. The draft service exists for the common case: you need a credible, honest ACR for a deal, and you have someone in-house who can make the conformance calls once the evidence is in front of them.