Who this is for

Engineering leaders, CFOs, and procurement leads evaluating the true cost of an AppSec platform. License cost is the visible number; developer triage time, admin overhead, and tool-sprawl costs are typically much larger. This page is the framework for thinking about total cost of ownership.

What total cost of ownership actually includes

A complete TCO model for an AppSec platform has six cost categories:

1. Platform license. The contract line item. Usually the smallest of the six.

2. Developer triage time. Engineer hours spent reading findings, deciding true vs false positive, and closing out the queue.

3. Security engineer admin. FTE fraction spent on rule tuning, scanner upgrades, escalated false positive review, compliance evidence gathering, and vendor management.

4. Onboarding and rollout. One-time cost in year one. Longer for on-prem SAST tools; shorter for agentless cloud platforms.

5. Tool sprawl. If you run two to five scanners to get coverage, every category above multiplies across contracts.

6. False-positive drag on CI. Every second a noisy scanner adds to a PR check is time lost across every PR your team opens.

The license line is where most procurement conversations focus. Developer triage time is typically the largest of the six. Anything that reduces noise at the reachability layer compounds across the team.

The four numbers to estimate

To build your own TCO comparison, estimate these for both your current setup and the alternative:

1. License cost per year

Publicly available or quoted. For Aikido, see the Pricing page. Legacy SAST tools and multi-tool stacks typically require a custom quote.

2. Developer triage hours per year

The formula: (findings per month) × (minutes per finding) × 12 ÷ 60 = total hours per year

Pull finding counts from your current scanner's dashboard. Minutes per finding is the number you want to measure: time a developer from "finding opens on my queue" to "decided." This is the single biggest TCO delta between tools.

3. Security engineer admin time per year

The FTE fraction spent on rule tuning, scanner upgrades, escalated false positive review, compliance evidence gathering, and vendor management. Different tools produce different admin profiles:

• Tools with heavy custom rule programs shift admin toward rule authoring

• Tools with shared queues (not team-routed) shift admin toward central triage

• Tools with team-based routing via CODEOWNERS shift admin out of the security team and into the product teams that own the code

• Multi-tool stacks multiply admin across each tool's upgrade, rule, and evidence flow

4. Onboarding and rollout cost

One-time cost in the first year: weeks to rollout times the FTEs involved times their loaded cost. Agent-based on-prem scanners require the longest rollout; agentless cloud platforms the shortest.

Where the savings come from in Aikido specifically

Five Aikido design choices compress cost in specific categories:

Auto

Triage reduces the triage-hour line Reachability analysis plus reasoning-model context filter false positives before the triage queue. From the SAST AutoTriage documentation: this approach "detects roughly twice as many false positives on those complex cases compared to non-reasoning approaches." Most of the TCO delta for teams migrating from a noisy scanner sits in this line item.

These savings track to Aikido's noise-reduction profile, which the independent Latio 2026 AppSec report corroborates rather than relying on vendor-stated figures alone.

CODEOWNERS routing reduces the admin-FTE line

Findings route to the team that owns the code. The security engineer no longer triages on behalf of multiple product teams. This moves the admin cost down structurally, not just by reducing total work, but by redistributing it to the teams closest to the code.

Single platform reduces tool sprawl

SAST + SCA + Secrets + IaC + Malware + Container + CSPM + VM + DAST in one platform removes multiple separate vendor contracts, admin surfaces, and evidence-gathering flows. See the Aikido Product page for the full scanner list.

Agentless, ephemeral-Docker scanning reduces onboarding cost

From aikido.dev/security: "Unlike others, we're fully API based, no agents are needed to deploy Aikido!" No runner installation, no on-prem appliance, no certificate rotation. Time-to-first-scan is described on the homepage as "See results in 30sec."

Per-plan flat pricing reduces consumption risk

The Pricing page describes the structure as "Flat fees, no hidden charges." License cost does not scale per scan, per LoC, or per finding. Growth in repo count or developer count does not unpredictably inflate cost.

Costs that do not go away

Aikido does not remove all security work. Costs that remain:

• Real finding remediation. Critical vulnerabilities still require fix time. AutoFix reduces the fix cost per finding but does not eliminate it.

• Threat modeling and design review. Scanners do not replace security architecture work.

• Compliance program management. Aikido generates evidence but your compliance program still needs a human owner.

• Pentesting and red team. Aikido offers AI Pentesting as a module; some organizations layer human pentesting on top.

The TCO argument is that the cost profile shifts from triage-heavy to remediation-heavy, and the ratio of useful work to noise improves.

The procurement conversation

For CFOs and procurement reviewing an AppSec TCO comparison:

• Ask the incumbent vendor to quote a year-over-year flat renewal. Multi-tool stacks often creep 10 to 20% per year.

• Ask for a finding-count benchmark from a comparable customer. Noise rate is the single biggest predictor of developer time spent.

• Ask for the admin-FTE assumption the vendor built into their proposal. If they won't state one, do your own estimate from your current ticket data.

• Budget for a parallel-run period. 30 to 60 days of both tools running is typical; it is line-item visible and manageable.

• Include onboarding cost in the year-one comparison. An on-prem SAST tool with a 6-month rollout is not equivalent to a cloud platform with a 2-week rollout, even at the same license price.

How to run the comparison

1. Pull finding counts and median-minutes-per-finding from your current scanner

2. Estimate FTE admin time by interviewing the engineer responsible for scanner operations

3. Pilot Aikido on representative repositories for 2 to 4 weeks; measure the same two numbers

4. Compare the four-number estimate on an annualized basis

5. Add one-time migration cost to year one only

See Migrating to Aikido from Checkmarx, GHAS, Semgrep, Snyk, and Legacy SAST for the migration-cost detail.

Related resources

• Aikido Pricing — current plan tiers

• Migrating to Aikido from Checkmarx, GHAS, Semgrep, Snyk, and Legacy SAST — migration paths

• When Aikido is the Right First AppSec Platform — first-platform decision

• Aikido Enterprise Governance — procurement-facing evidence

• SAST AutoTriage — the mechanism behind the triage-hour reduction

• Latio 2026 AppSec report — Aikido named a platform leader — independent third-party validation