How Much Does It Cost to Audit or Fix a Vibe-Coded App? ($0 to $50K, What Each Tier Finds)

TL;DR: Auditing a vibe-coded app costs $0 to about $1,500 as of November 2026. Free scanners built into Lovable and Supabase catch the obvious holes. Fixed-fee human audits from published price lists run $199 to $1,499. A pen test, where someone actively tries to break in, adds about $3,000 to $6,000. The audit is the cheap part. Fixing what it finds is the real bill: $25K to $50K fixed for most apps in my own rescue work, from $15K for light ones. Below is every tier with its published price, what it catches, and what it misses.

I've shipped 50+ products, I was CTO at an AI startup, and these days a lot of my work is rescuing apps that were built with Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor or v0. The question I get first is almost always "what will this cost me?" Here's the honest answer, using other people's published prices as well as mine so you can compare.

Five tiers, from $0 to a full rescue

What an audit actually checks, and why a scanner can't do all of it

There are two ways to look for security holes. Static analysis reads your code and settings and flags patterns that look risky: a table with row level security (the per-table rule for who can read which rows) turned off, a secret key sitting in browser code, an npm package with a known bug. Dynamic analysis, which is what a pen test does, pokes at the running app with real requests to see what actually gets through.

Both are good at things that look the same in every app. Neither knows your business. The most serious bug I find in AI-built apps is a broken access check: the app confirms you're logged in but never confirms the invoice, file or client note you asked for is yours. To a scanner, that code looks fine. To a person who knows a coach shouldn't see another coach's clients, it's the whole problem.

So a good audit is a person reading the code against a list of what your app is supposed to allow. That's why it costs more than a scan and less than a fix: it's a few days of reading, not weeks of changing. Lovable's own security docs say its built-in tools "cannot guarantee complete security" and suggest a professional review for apps handling sensitive data.

Tier 1 and 2: what $0 to $7 gets you

If you built on Lovable, both of its scans are free. The Quick scan runs on every publish and checks database rules, dependencies and an exposed MCP server. The Deep scan reads your app's code for access control, injection, leaked secrets, payments and login problems, but you have to start it. Fixing findings with its "Try to fix all" button draws on 10 free fixes, then uses credits. If you're on your own Supabase project, the Security Advisor in the dashboard flags any table that's open to the public API.

The DIY layer is a checklist. I give away a 20-point vibe coding security checklist that walks through the mistakes AI builders make most: open tables, secret keys in frontend variables, unverified Stripe webhooks, no rate limiting on login. I also sell a $7 Agent Audit Prompt Pack, 10 prompts that make Cursor, Claude Code, Replit or Windsurf audit your app read-only. If you built on Lovable specifically, start with my breakdown of whether Lovable is secure, which has a 10-minute version. If you want a second opinion from a paid tool, I compared the best security scanners for vibe-coded apps, free ones first.

What you get for $0: the obvious holes. What you don't: anyone telling you whether the rules match your business.

Tier 3: fixed-fee audits run $199 to $1,500

This is the tier most founders actually need before launch, and the published prices are lower than people expect:

• Valletta Software: from $199 for a single-feature MVP under 5,000 lines of code (3 business days), from $799 for a multi-feature SaaS of 5,000 to 25,000 lines (5 days), and from $1,499 for an "investor-ready" package with a summary you can hand to a due diligence reviewer (7 days).
• RapidDevelopers: $1,000 fixed for a standard Lovable app, about 5 business days, read-only, with the fee credited if you hire them for the fixes. Bigger apps get quoted first.
• VibeAudits: a $29 a month mentor plan if you want a senior engineer to ask questions, or a partner plan from $1,000 where they audit, fix and maintain.

Lines of code is a rough way to size an audit, but it's the honest one. A small app with one table is quick to read. A SaaS with teams, roles and billing has many more places for an access rule to be wrong.

My own first step is free. A Vibe Code Rescue starts with a free repo audit: I read the code and send a short video walkthrough plus a written summary of what I'd fix first. I only do a few a month, and live apps with real users go first.

Do you need a pen test first? Usually not, and here's what one costs

A penetration test is someone (or an AI agent) actively attacking your running app and writing up what got through. It's the tier that produces a report you can show an enterprise customer. Published prices:

• Pentest-Tools.com: a black-box web app test (they attack as an anonymous outsider) at a fixed $3,400, 3 working days, report on day 4. A grey-box test (they also log in as your users) starts at $3,400 plus $900 per user role.
• Astra: an autonomous AI pentest at $2,999 a year for one target, or tests by certified human pentesters plus agents at $5,999 a year. Its cheapest scheduled vulnerability scanner is $69 a month.
• Lovable's Aikido connector: Lovable workspaces can run AI pentests through Aikido. Lovable's docs say Aikido bills for these separately; they don't use Lovable credits.

Order matters. Lovable's docs recommend running the scanners first, fixing what they find, and then validating with a pen test. I'd say the same. Paying $3,400 for a pen tester to tell you your tables are open is paying a lot for what a free scan already knew. Get the pen test when a customer's security questionnaire asks for one, or after a rescue, to prove the fixes hold.

If what a customer actually asked for is SOC 2, that's a different audit of your company's processes, not your code. Vanta puts the audit fee alone at $10,000 to $50,000, and a first SOC 2 at $10,000 to $80,000 or more all in.

What fixing costs: why the fix is the real bill

An audit tells you how big the problem is. The fix is where the money goes. Wavect, another rescue shop, says the same in its cost write-up: the audit is a few focused days to about a week, and the hardening "is where the real spend lands."

Here are my published prices, since you'll want a number. Vibe Code Rescue is fixed price: $25K to $50K for most apps, from $15K for a light rescue, and $60K to $100K for a complex SaaS, over 4 to 8 weeks. Fixed price matters more than the number. You know the total before work starts, and nobody bills you for the hours they spent figuring out what the AI wrote. In the rescue case study I published, a B2B SaaS went from a broken AI-built MVP to production in 6 weeks for $40K, against a $150K agency quote.

What moves the price inside that range: how many user roles you have, whether payments are involved, how much data is already live (migrating real customer data carefully takes time), and whether the code can be fixed in place or needs parts rebuilt. Most apps I see need targeted fixes, not a rewrite.

Why the audit is cheaper than the incident

The base rate is not in your favor. In Veracode's 2025 test of 100+ AI models on 80 coding tasks, the models "chose the insecure option 45 percent of the time" when given a choice between a secure and an insecure way to write the code. It's a lab benchmark and says nothing direct about your app, but it's why I assume an AI-built app has at least one hole until someone has looked.

And the cost of not looking is public. In February 2026, The Register reported on one Lovable app with 16 flaws, 6 of them critical, that exposed 18,697 user records. The bug was a login check written backwards. A $199 to $1,000 audit is built to catch exactly that.

Which tier you need

• No real users yet: tiers 1 and 2. Run the free scans and the checklist, fix what they find.
• Paying customers or personal data: add a tier 3 audit before your next launch or marketing push.
• An enterprise customer sent a security questionnaire: tier 3 first, fix, then a tier 4 pen test so you have a report to send back.
• The audit came back long, or the app already broke in production: tier 5, scoped from the audit.

Do this today

Before you pay anyone, run the free tier. If you're on Lovable, open your project's Security view and click Run deep scan. If you're on your own Supabase project, open the Security Advisor. Write down every Critical finding. That list is what you'll hand to whoever audits or fixes your app, and it makes every quote above more accurate.

Sources

• Valletta Software, Vibe Coding Audit: $199, $799 and $1,499 tiers. Read November 3, 2026.
• RapidDevelopers, Lovable security audit: $1,000 fixed. Read November 3, 2026.
• VibeAudits: $29/month Mentor, Partner from $1,000. Read November 3, 2026.
• Pentest-Tools.com, web app penetration testing: $3,400 fixed, $900 per user role. Read November 3, 2026.
• Astra pricing: $2,999/year and $5,999/year pentests, $69/month scanner. Read November 3, 2026.
• Lovable docs, Security: free scans, 10 free fixes, Aikido billing, recommended order. Read November 3, 2026.
• Vanta, what does a SOC 2 audit cost: $10,000 to $50,000 audit fee. Read November 3, 2026.
• Wavect, what it costs to make a vibe-coded app production-ready. Read November 3, 2026.
• Veracode press release, July 30, 2025: 45 percent, 80 tasks.
• The Register, February 27, 2026: 18,697 records.