I wouldn't be surprised if this cryptographic review cost $40k without breaking a sweat.

There's an interesting blog post just waiting to be written about why this makes sense. It's something you have to experience as an insider to understand. It's why most attempts at creating a startup to do it cheaply at scale have failed, for example. It ends up a nice consulting business for those lone-wolf pentesters, but not a startup. If you're going to be a startup like Matasano you have to be up front about the cost and not compete primarily on cost.

The reason this pricing structure makes sense is because there are two aspects to security: 1. being secure, 2. security theater. Critically, both are valuable, and dismissing #2 is a mistake.

If something goes wrong, you need that security audit document to fall back on. NCC Group's reputation is at stake. When they say there is only one low severity finding and some info findings, what they're really saying is that a bad guy has to be smarter than the reviewers Alex Bladucci, Jake Meredith and Andy Lee working together to break your system for two solid weeks. And even then the bad guy might get lucky or genuinely be smarter.

That's 10 days that they cannot do anything else. You can see that if you have 100 clients in your pipeline, this quickly becomes a problem. It's why Matasano didn't fall over when they started reaching this scale -- their recruitment challenges ensured they had the talent to meet the demand. Literally anyone off the street could do them and become a pentester.

Corollary: If you're going to review 100 companies' codebases, you either need to raise the price to shocking levels, or you need to recruit a small pentester army. NCC's strategy for the latter seems to be to buy them all. With effective results.

As a dev, you'll recognize the classic problem here: you can't have a baby in less than 9 months, no matter how much you try to shift the schedule around. It takes two people two weeks to pentest a client. And if you don't have two people working to break a codebase/cryptosystem for two weeks, I would be very hesitant to call it secure. It takes almost a week to get your mind into a state where you understand the target well enough to exploit it in creative ways. (There are usually lots of easier un-creative exploits lurking though, so that week is typically still productive.)

My $40k number might be off by $20k in either direction, but it's fundamentally a shocking number. The salespeoples' job is to make people understand the value. And to capture the big companies, who can afford to do pentests every release cycle.

That leaves a massive gap that seems like an opportunity: YC startups. They've only recently gotten enough investment in the initial stages where spending that amount of money can make some kind of sense. Spending 10% of your runway is incredibly scary. I've spent a long time thinking of how to resolve this problem without much success. For example, I'd be available to do it less expensively, but I'm one person. If something goes wrong, you can't say "well sillysaurus pentested us." I've thought about starting a company to do this, but then you're back to square one: competing on price alone. That inevitably devolves into a consulting business, not a startup. And even then you won't be able to keep those kinds of prices that low for very long.

So what do you do if you want to create a startup to fill this gap? Make tools, and let the tools do the work. Sadly, this is about as easy as making that sufficiently smart compiler that we've been working on for the last 60 years. You could argue that there is value in letting an automated tool scan your codebase, and that maybe you could throw deep learning at the problem to achieve some success. Maybe. I have an xss.txt file that contains exploits that work on almost every client I throw them at. But occasionally you'll run into a situation where it works, but only with a twist. And those twists seem very hard to automate. Pentesting is as creative as programming, so when you claim you can make a startup to solve "the security problem" (aka nobody can afford it), what you're saying is you either have a way to recruit lots of pentesters or you've figured out how to automate a field that relies on creativity at its core.