How we compare
Three honest comparisons. No invented savings, no dunking on anyone: just who each option is for, and what you actually get.
Against a security agency or a penetration test
A professional penetration test is a skilled person spending days trying to break into your app by hand. For a small web app in the United States that typically runs from about $4,000 to $20,000, and the report is written for engineers.
It is thorough, and if you are a funded company with sensitive data you will eventually want one. But it is slow, expensive, and it hands a non-technical founder a document they cannot act on. GuardCue is automated, costs a few tens of dollars, runs in about a minute, and is written so you can fix things yourself. It does not replace a human pentest; it catches the common, serious mistakes long before you would pay for one.
Pentest pricing: typical 2026 US ranges reported by Bright Defense and Blaze Information Security.
Against hiring a freelance developer
You can pay a developer by the hour to look your app over. A good one will find real problems, but you pay for every hour, it takes days to line up, and you only get the things you knew to ask about. A developer who does not specialise in security may miss the exact database-rule mistakes these tools make most.
GuardCue checks the same class of problems every time, on a schedule, for a flat price, and tells you which ones matter in plain words. When you do bring in a developer, our technical hand-off tells them exactly what to fix, so you pay for the fix, not the hunt.
Against the other AI-app scanners
Several tools scan AI-built apps, and they find similar faults to ours. The honest difference is not what we find, it is who we write for. Most of them report to developers. We write every finding for the person who built the app and cannot read code, we show you a blanked picture of your own leaking screen, and when a check could not run we say so instead of showing a clean result you did not earn.
| Option | Typical cost | Speed | Written for | Who fixes it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Security agency / pentest | ~$4,000–$20,000 | Days to weeks | Engineers | You hire someone |
| Freelance developer | By the hour, adds up | Days | Depends on them | They do, if they can |
| GuardCue | Free to see, from $29 | About a minute | You, the founder | You paste our words in |
The strong claim, and the true one: you fix it yourself by pasting our words into the tool you built with. That needs no developer. It is not one button, and we will not pretend it is; it is copy, paste, publish.