How Much Does a CRO Audit Cost? $99 vs a $15,000 Agency Engagement
CRO audit pricing is all over the map. You'll find free automated scans, a few hundred dollars on Upwork, four figures from a solo consultant, and $15,000 to $50,000 from an agency with a case studies page full of logos you recognize.
The spread looks irrational until you understand that these are not the same product. Here's what the money buys.
What a $15,000 agency engagement actually includes
I'll be fair to the agencies here, because the number is not a scam. A real agency engagement at that price is usually buying you:
Is your site converting as well as it could be?
Get a CRO Audit - $99- Analytics work. Someone goes into your GA4, fixes the tracking that has been broken for eight months, sets up proper event and funnel reporting, and builds the segments needed to see where people actually drop.
- Qualitative research. Session recordings, heatmaps, on-site polls, sometimes customer interviews. Real evidence rather than opinion.
- A testing program. Not one audit but a hypothesis backlog, a testing tool, and someone running experiments over months.
- Implementation. The big one. Designers and developers who actually build the changes, so the recommendations become live pages instead of a document.
- Account management. Meetings, reporting, a person whose job is to be reachable.
If you're doing serious volume and one percentage point of conversion rate is worth six figures a year to you, that's a rational purchase. The engagement pays for itself on a single winning test.
Why that number is absurd for most small businesses
Run the arithmetic on your own store before you take that meeting.
Say you do $20,000 a month in revenue at a 2% conversion rate. A very good CRO engagement might lift you to 2.6%, a 30% relative improvement. That's roughly $6,000 more per month, or $72,000 a year. The $15,000 is worth it.
Now say you do $4,000 a month. Same 30% lift is $1,200 a month, $14,400 a year. You just spent your entire first year of gains, before implementation costs, to find out what to fix. And that assumes the engagement delivers a 30% lift, which nobody can promise you.
Below a certain revenue line, the agency model doesn't fail because agencies are bad. It fails because the fixed cost of their process is larger than your upside.
What the free scanners give you
Automated audit tools are genuinely useful and you should run them. PageSpeed Insights is free and will tell you real things about performance.
What they can't do is read your offer. A script can tell you your images are unoptimized. It cannot tell you that your headline describes your company instead of your customer's problem, that your pricing page buries the plan most people want, or that the testimonial you're most proud of is sitting below your footer. It also can't rank anything, because ranking requires knowing which problem costs you the most, and that's a judgment call about your specific business.
Free scanners find the machine-readable problems. Those are rarely the expensive ones.
What $99 buys from me
A full conversion audit of your site or landing page, delivered as a professional document in one business day.
I go through the page the way a buyer does. Positioning and headline, offer clarity, CTA hierarchy, trust signals and where they're placed, objection handling, the mobile experience specifically, form or checkout friction, and load performance where it's costing you conversions. Every issue gets written up with what's wrong, why it's costing you, and what to do instead. Then the whole list gets ranked, so the first thing you read is the thing to fix first.
You can read through a real one section by section here. What you're paying for is the ranked list. That's the part a tool can't produce and an agency charges five figures to wrap in process.
What $99 does not buy
Being straight with you about the limits, because a cheap audit oversold is worse than no audit.
It does not include implementation. I tell you what to fix. You or your developer make the changes. It does not include a testing program, months of experiments, or ongoing account management. It does not include customer interviews or moderated user research, which are genuinely valuable and genuinely expensive. And it is not a substitute for fixing your analytics if your tracking is broken, though I'll tell you if it looks like it is.
It's one expert pass over your site, ranked and written down. For most small businesses that have never had anyone look properly, that pass finds more money than anything else they could spend $99 on.
How to pick your tier
Run the same math I did above with your own numbers. Take your monthly revenue, assume a 20% to 30% relative conversion lift as an optimistic outcome, and see what that's worth over a year. Then don't spend more than a meaningful fraction of it finding out what to fix, because you still have to pay to fix it.
If that number is small, start cheap and specific. If it's large, the agencies are worth talking to and you should stop reading blog posts about $99 audits.
Most people land in between, which is the whole reason I priced it this way. The audit is here, and this is what I typically find.