An audit is unusual among consulting deliverables: it is cheap to produce, expensive to price, and the money is almost never in the audit itself. Getting this wrong in either direction costs real revenue — charge too much and it stops opening doors, charge nothing and it reads as worthless.
First, decide what the audit is for
There are only two honest answers, and they price completely differently.
The audit is a sales instrument. You run it on a prospect’s portal to start a conversation you could not otherwise start. Its job is to earn the meeting and prove you know things they do not. Revenue comes from the work it uncovers.
The audit is the deliverable. A client pays you to assess their portal and hand over findings. Revenue is the fee, and the engagement ends when the report does.
Most firms think they are doing the second and are actually doing the first. If the audit reliably leads to remediation work, it is a sales instrument, and pricing it like a deliverable suppresses the thing it is good at.
Why the first one is usually free
Charging for a prospect audit introduces a purchase decision at precisely the moment you want none. A prospect who has never worked with you is not weighing €900 against the value of findings — they are weighing it against the risk that you are not worth talking to. That is a much harder sale than the audit deserves, and the fee you win is a rounding error against the engagement you lose.
Free also changes what you are allowed to say. A free audit that surfaces uncomfortable findings reads as generous. The same findings behind an invoice read as justifying the invoice, and the client discounts them accordingly.
The counter-argument is real and worth stating: free things get treated as free, and a prospect who did not pay may not show up to the readout. The fix is not a fee — it is scope. Make the free audit narrow, specific and fast, and make the readout a scheduled conversation rather than an emailed PDF.
Where charging does make sense: when the portal is large enough that the audit is genuinely a project, when the client has explicitly asked for an assessment as a piece of work, or when you need a paid step to qualify out tyre-kickers in a market where you are overwhelmed with inbound. That last one is a nice problem and most firms do not have it.
Pricing the audit when you do charge
Price on the size of the portal, not the hours. Hours are the wrong axis for two reasons: the work is largely automated, so hours understate the value, and a client who sees an hourly rate will negotiate the hours.
Portal size — users, contacts, hubs in use — correlates with both the value of the findings and the effort of interpreting them. It is also a number the client already knows and cannot dispute.
A defensible structure:
- A fixed fee by band. Three bands is plenty. The bands should be visibly tied to something real, like user count, so the client can place themselves without a conversation.
- A readout included, always. The readout is where the engagement is sold. Never make it optional and never let it be the thing that gets cut for budget.
- Remediation quoted separately, and only after the readout. Quoting remediation in the same document turns the audit into a sales proposal and licenses the client to read every finding as an upsell.
The number that actually sets the price
The strongest anchor in a HubSpot audit is identified annual saving — usually seat waste, sometimes marketing-contact tier. It is concrete, it is denominated in the client’s own money, and it is verifiable in their own portal.
Two rules for using it.
Never price as a percentage of the saving. It is tempting and it backfires. It makes the fee unpredictable before the work, invites arguments about whether a saving was real, and creates an incentive to inflate findings that a sceptical client will assume you acted on.
Do let it set the ceiling. If the audit reliably identifies five figures of annual waste, a four-figure fee is obviously reasonable and does not need defending. If it identifies nothing, you have learned something important about that client — and the honest move is to say so rather than to pad the report.
That second case is worth planning for. An audit that finds little is not a failure; it is a clean bill of health, which has its own value if you deliver it with confidence instead of apologising for it.
Where the actual money is
Reprice the whole question: the audit is not the product. The product is the relationship it opens, and the two things worth selling off the back of it are:
The remediation. Findings are a scope document written by the client’s own portal. That is a far easier project to sell than one you proposed unprompted, because you are not arguing about whether the problem exists.
The recurring version. A one-off audit tells a client what is wrong today. It says nothing about next quarter, and a portal drifts continuously — every hire, departure, role change and integration moves the numbers. A monthly or quarterly audit produces evidence the relationship is working, month after month, and it is far easier to renew a retainer that reports a trend than one that reports activity.
That second point is the one most firms leave on the table. The first audit is the hardest one to sell and every subsequent one is nearly free to produce — which is the definition of something that should be recurring revenue rather than a repeated one-off sale.
A note on the saving you find
A client who saves €30,000 a year on seats has €30,000 they did not have. It is worth being explicit with them that the sensible use of it is not to bank it but to redirect it — the spend stays flat, the mix shifts from licences nobody uses to work that moves the business.
That framing is better for them and better for you, and it is only credible if you make it before you quote the remediation rather than after.