$18,300
average penetration test
Typical engagements run $10,000–$35,000; web application tests $5,000–$30,000. Human testers, weeks of calendar, a human opinion at a point in time.
Synack 2026 pricing survey →Verification costs
Verification has always been a high-ticket purchase.
Every figure on this page is published market data, linked to its source. A FalseGreen Job is $2,999 — here is exactly where that sits.
The market for certainty
What verification already costs.
Companies already pay for independent verification at every release, launch, and human audit. These are the prices they pay today.
$25,000
per engineer-week at a top human audit firm
Trail of Bits bills roughly $25,000 per engineer per week; typical engagements run $80,000–$200,000+. OpenZeppelin engagements run $50,000–$200,000+.
Spark audit-firm comparison, 2026 →$20,000–$60,000
a mid-size human code audit
Standard protocol audits run $20,000–$60,000; simple scoped reviews start at $5,000. Every one of them is a human reading code on a deadline.
Sherlock audit-market guide, 2026 →$1M / quarter
formal verification as a service
Certora proposed formal verification to Compound at about $1M per quarter — and the proposal was rejected as not cost-effective. The prover was open-sourced in 2025.
Compound community proposal →~$100 / line
safety certification evidence
DO-178C avionics certification evidence runs on the order of $100 per line of code. Verification consumes 60–80% of the project budget.
Aviation Today; Vita Technologies →$30K–$150K / yr
continuous scanner subscriptions
Mid-market budgets for Snyk, Semgrep, Checkmarx, and Veracode seats and contracts. They find issues continuously and never issue a verdict.
AppSec Santa pricing guide, 2026 →The same category, machine-priced
$2,999
per FalseGreen Job
Whole-program verification against your frozen contract. Machine verdict in minutes. Seven free re-checks in the same price. A report you can re-verify offline, at any time — falsegreen verify-report ./report.json.
Compare against the breach
What an unverified release costs.
$4.44M
average global cost of a data breach (2025)
The US average reached $10.22M — the highest ever recorded.
IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 →$2M / hour
median cost of a high-impact outage
41% of enterprises report hourly costs between $1M and $5M or more.
New Relic 2025; ITIC Hourly Cost of Downtime →147 of 245
breaches hit platforms that had already passed a human audit
Human-audited platforms accounted for 88% of the $3.63B lost. Human audits do not stop incidents.
CoinGecko State of Crypto Security, via Certora →$4.91M
average cost of a supply-chain compromise
The #2 most common initial vector (15%) and the second costliest — 267 days to identify and contain.
IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 →The honest limit of human opinions
Human audits do not stop breaches.
Of 245 security incidents between January 2025 and July 2026 — $3.63 billion lost — 147 hit platforms that had already passed human audits, and human-audited platforms accounted for 88% of the money stolen. A human audit is a human opinion at a point in time, on a deadline, that cannot be re-checked afterwards.
Source: Certora / CoinGecko State of Crypto Security 2026
Meanwhile AI coding tools are measurably degrading code structure: duplicated code blocks are up 81% since 2023 and refactoring is down 70%, across 623 million analyzed changes. More code, less checking, is the market you are shipping into.
Source: GitClear 2026
What a Job adds
- ✓ A machine verdict, not a human opinion — same rigor every run.
- ✓ Whole-program scope: criteria, proofs, and security checks in one frozen contract.
- ✓ Minutes, not weeks — the verdict arrives while the release is still moving.
- ✓ Re-checkable at any time: anyone, anytime, can verify the report offline.
- ✓ Seven free re-checks — the price buys acceptance, not an attempt.
How verification is bought
Verification is an event, not a subscription.
| Product | Bought for | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Penetration test | Annual compliance, pre-launch | 1–4× per year |
| Human code or security audit | Pre-launch, funding round, acquisition | Per milestone |
| Formal verification | Flagged protocol versions | Per flagship release |
| Safety certification | Regulatory milestones | Per program |
| FalseGreen Job | The release that matters | Per program you ship |
The per-change guard never costs extra. The FalseGreen Gate runs in your CI on every pull request, free, and stops any change whose exact code a FalseGreen Job has not accepted. You pay $2,999 only for the verdict on what you ship.
Method
Figures are published list prices, vendor surveys, and market reports as last read in October 2026. Ranges vary by scope, vendor tier, and negotiation; averages are all-types unless stated. Where a single vendor's published price exists, it is linked; where the market is quoted, the range across firms is given. This page is about orders of magnitude, not quotes — no vendor on this page verifies a whole program with a machine verdict.