Smart Contract Audit
Audits are priced by reading time
Reviewers quote against the hours it takes to understand your system, so nearly everything you control is how much there is to read and how ready it is.
Get a scoped estimateWhy two quotes for the same-sized repo look nothing alike
Two teams hand over repositories of a similar size. One wrote a token with a fixed supply; the other wrote a lending market, and its quote is several times higher. Reviewers are not paid by the line — they are paid to hold a system in their head until they find the state it should never reach.
So the question that moves the answer most is not how big the code is. It is how much of it already exists somewhere else. A parameter change to a widely deployed protocol is a known shape. Novel reward accounting is not, and every hour of the review goes on the part nobody has read before.
Cost drivers
What actually moves the number
Each of these is something you can still change before you book a slot, and each one shows up in the quote whether or not anyone points it out to you.
How much of the code is yours
An unmodified OpenZeppelin ERC-20 reads in an afternoon. Custom vesting maths with cliffs and clawback rights does not, and that gap is most of the quote.
Every external protocol you call
A Chainlink price feed, a Uniswap pool, an Aave deposit. Each one drags its own failure modes into your threat model, and a reviewer has to hold all of them.
Upgradeability
A UUPS proxy adds storage-layout checks, initialiser guards and an admin key that can replace your logic entirely. Reviewing who holds that key is part of the work.
Economics, not just Solidity
Staking rewards, liquidation thresholds and bonding curves need modelling under adversarial prices. That is a different skill from reading code, and it is scoped separately.
Test coverage on handover day
The first days of any engagement go on working out what the code was meant to do. A tested repo with NatSpec comments shortens that, sometimes to a single day.
Whether the branch is frozen
Every commit merged mid-review invalidates finished work. Teams that keep shipping during an engagement pay for the same contracts twice. It is the most common overrun we see.
Remediation rounds
One fix round is usually included. A rewrite made in response to a critical finding is new code, not a fix, so check what the fee actually covers.
Cross-chain messaging
A bridge or a LayerZero-style message path doubles the systems in scope and adds a trust assumption you did not write. Budget it as its own project.
Admin powers and key custody
A single owner key that can pause withdrawals is a finding in itself. Multisig and timelock setup is real work, and reviewers will ask who signs.
Scope tiers
Four realistic shapes of engagement
Pick the smallest tier that covers the contracts holding value. Everything else can be reviewed later, or never, if it cannot lose anyone money.
- TIER 1 — READINESS REVIEW
- Pre-audit clean-up and a fix list. Ships in 1–2 weeks.
- ₹50k – ₹1L$570 – $1.1k
- Static analysis, a manual read of the custom logic, test-coverage gaps closed and NatSpec written where it is missing. Suits teams heading for a review who want the reading week to be short. Does NOT include a signed third-party report.
- TIER 2 — SINGLE-CONTRACT AUDIT
- One frozen contract set reviewed and reported. Ships in 2–3 weeks.
- ₹1.5L – ₹2.5L$1.7k – $2.8k
- A token, vesting or staking contract on one chain, standard patterns, one remediation round and a published report from an independent firm. Suits launches with a defined supply and no live market logic. Does NOT include economic modelling or a second opinion.
- TIER 3 — PROTOCOL AUDIT
- Full protocol review with invariant testing. Ships in 4–8 weeks.
- ₹4L – ₹9L$4.5k – $10k
- Custom DeFi logic, external integrations, proxy and access-control review, fuzz and invariant tests written against your stated rules, two remediation rounds. Suits anything custodying user funds. Does NOT include bridges, cross-chain messaging or formal verification.
- TIER 4 — HIGH-VALUE PROTOCOL PROGRAMME
- Two independent reviews plus live monitoring. Ships in 3–5 months.
- From ₹20LFrom $23k
- Sequenced reviews by two firms, formal verification on the core invariants, adversarial economic review, a bug bounty and on-chain monitoring from launch day. Suits protocols expecting serious deposits. Does NOT cover re-review of future releases without a retainer.
Indicative ranges for scoping conversations, not quotes. They reflect what work of this shape has cost us to deliver — your figure comes out of a paid discovery, against a written scope, and is fixed before any code is written. Gas, licences, cloud and third-party audit fees sit outside these numbers.
How we work
From repository to a report you can publish
Timelines below assume the contracts are feature-complete when we start. If they are not, the useful thing is to say so before a slot is booked rather than after.
Scope read
3–5 daysWe count what is genuinely in scope, separate your code from library code, and agree the exact commit the review will run against.
Readiness pass
1–2 weeksCoverage gaps closed, dead code deleted, docs written. This is where scope shrinks, and occasionally where we say the design needs changing before anyone reviews it.
Review and remediation
2–8 weeksAn independent firm works through the frozen code. We turn findings into fixes, and the re-review confirms the fix introduced nothing new.
Deploy and watch
OngoingVerified deployment, the report published, monitoring on admin functions and unusual transfers, and a written plan for who responds when something fires.
Is now the right time to audit?
Worth reading before you book a slot. Reviewers are booked weeks out, and a slot spent on unfinished code is spent twice.
Worth budgeting for now if…
- Your contracts will custody funds or tokens belonging to other people
- A launchpad, exchange or partner has asked to see a report
- The contracts are feature-complete and you can freeze the branch
- An upgradeable proxy gives an admin key power over user balances
Wait, if…
- The design still changes weekly; you would pay to review it twice
- You are on testnet with no real user funds at risk yet
- Test coverage is thin — close that first and the review shortens
- You are still deciding whether this needs a chain at all
Frequently Asked
Questions
Common questions about scoping a review, what to cut, and what happens after the report lands.
Novelty, mostly. A fork of a widely deployed protocol with changed parameters is a known quantity; custom accounting, reward maths or liquidation logic is not, and reviewers price the reasoning it takes to break it. After that come the number of external protocols your contracts call, upgradeable proxies and the admin keys behind them, deployment across several chains, and cross-chain messaging. Thin test coverage raises it quietly, because the opening days of any engagement are spent working out what the code was supposed to do.
Cut scope before you cut rigour. Contracts that hold no value and cannot be reached by an attacker can come out of the review entirely, and internal admin tooling usually can too. Dropping the remediation round is the false economy: findings you never fix are worse than findings you never had, because now they are written down and dated. If budget is tight, ship a smaller contract surface and review all of it rather than a large one and review part.
Three things. Developer time to fix what the report finds, which lands in the same week as everything else and is rarely on anyone's plan. The re-review after those fixes, because a fix is new code and new code has not been reviewed. And the launch itself: verified deployment, the admin multisig, monitoring, and a written incident plan naming who is called at three in the morning. Changing the contracts after sign-off also means the report describes something you are no longer deploying.
A report is a snapshot of one commit, so the running cost is keeping that snapshot true. Monitoring on admin functions and unusual transfers, a bug bounty if real value sits in the contracts, and a re-review whenever you upgrade a proxy or deploy to a new chain. Node and gas infrastructure sit alongside that. If your contracts are immutable and genuinely finished, ongoing cost can be close to nothing, and we will say so rather than sell you a retainer.
Usually phase it. A readiness review first, then a review of the contracts that hold value, then a shorter pass once peripheral features settle. Phasing works because the expensive part is reading unfamiliar code, and a firm that has already read your core system reads the next version faster. The exception is a single launch date with everything shipping together. Then one larger engagement beats three small ones, and holding the code freeze is far easier.
Have a project in mind?
Fixed price after a paid discovery — no hourly billing. A real engineer reads every enquiry, and we reply within 24 hours.