Pre-launch QA testing costs between $300 and $1,500 for most websites and apps. A single page or one checkout flow sits at the low end. A large product with accounts, payments, and several user types sits at the top. Anything quoted above $3,000 is either an enterprise engagement or padded.
That is the short answer. The rest of this explains what moves the number, so you can tell a fair quote from a bad one.
What actually drives the price
Four things. Nothing else matters much.
The number of user journeys. Not pages. A tester does not walk your site page by page. We follow what a customer does: find a product, add it to the basket, pay, get a confirmation. One journey crosses six pages. Six static pages with no journey take less time than one checkout.
This is why quotes based on page count are a warning sign. It tells you the vendor is estimating from a sitemap instead of from your product.
The number of user types. A site where everyone sees the same thing is one product. A site with customers, sellers, and administrators is three products that share a database. Each role needs its own pass, and the interesting bugs live where the roles meet.
Browsers and devices. Chrome on a laptop is one environment. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox across phone, tablet, and desktop is nine. Every added environment adds real hours, because you re-walk the same journeys and the failures are rarely in the same place.
Payments. Payment flows take disproportionate time. You test declined cards, expired cards, wrong CVCs, currency handling, failed redirects back from the payment provider, and what happens when someone closes the tab mid-transaction. Stripe reviewed 1,600 leading e-commerce sites and found that 95% made five or more basic errors in their checkout. More than one in three European checkouts accepted an invalid card number. These are large companies with engineering teams.
What the market charges
| Scope | Typical market price |
|---|---|
| Landing page or single flow | $349–$399 |
| Full website or app | $749–$899 |
| Large product, accounts and payments | $1,199–$1,999 |
| Ongoing monthly testing | $1,099–$1,600 |
Hourly rates for manual testers run from roughly $30 to $110 outside the US, and $50 to $300 inside it. That spread is wide enough to be useless as a guide, which is the main argument for buying a fixed-price package instead. When you buy hours, you carry the risk of the estimate being wrong. When you buy a fixed price, the tester carries it.
Our own packages start at $349 and are listed in full on the pricing section.
What you should get for the money
Ask for these before you pay. A tester who cannot supply them is selling you their time rather than a result.
- A written report with every issue listed separately
- Steps to reproduce each issue, numbered, that a developer can follow without asking you a question
- A screenshot or short video for anything visual
- The browser, device, and operating system where each issue appeared
- A severity rating, so you know what blocks your launch and what can wait
- One round of retesting after your fixes, included in the price
That last point matters more than people expect. Fixes create new bugs. A test round with no retest tells you what was broken last week, not what is broken now.
You can see an example of the reports we produce here.
Three things that should make you suspicious
A quote given without seeing the product. Nobody can price this from a description. If a vendor quotes before looking, they are either guessing or planning to raise it later.
Pricing by page count. As above. It means they have not thought about your product as something people use.
No retest included. This is the most common way a cheap quote becomes an expensive one.
What happens if you skip it
Poor software quality cost the US economy an estimated $2.41 trillion in 2022, according to CISQ. That number is too large to feel real, so here is a smaller one. Stripe's research with Harris Poll found developers spend 17.3 hours a week on maintenance issues — debugging, refactoring, and fixing bad code.
You are paying for that time whether or not you hire a tester. The only question is whether it gets spent before launch by someone whose job it is, or after launch by your developers, at the worst possible moment.
Ready to get a fixed price for your product? See our testing packages or send us your site and we will tell you which one fits.