Most questions about marketing audit cost come down to one thing that never appears on the quote: who is actually going to read your data, and for how long. A SaaS company's marketing lives in five or six systems at once. An audit that looks at one of them for twenty minutes and an audit that reads all of them for two weeks can share a name and differ by a factor of ten in what you learn.
So before the numbers, here is what you should be paying for.
What a SaaS marketing audit should actually cover
A useful audit reads the systems where your funnel really lives, not just your homepage:
Analytics. Are signups, activation events and trial-to-paid conversions tracked as events you can trust, or is half the funnel a guess?
Search Console. Which queries you already show up for, which pages Google has crawled but chosen not to index, and whether your docs or changelog are quietly doing more work than your blog.
Your CRM. Lifecycle stages, source fields, and whether anyone can answer "where did our last ten customers come from?" without opening a spreadsheet.
The site itself, or the repo or CMS behind it. Rendering, templates, metadata, internal links. On a JavaScript-heavy marketing site this is often where the biggest problems hide.
Positioning. What your homepage and pricing page say, set against the words buyers actually use when they search and when they talk to sales.
None of this needs anyone to change anything. Google's own advice for an SEO audit is to "only grant read access to Search Console" at that stage (sourced from Google Search Central), and the same logic applies to every other system on the list. Read access is enough to diagnose. Write access is for whoever does the work afterwards.
Because a CRM review means looking at how you collect and store contacts, a good audit should also check your consent records. Under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), every commercial email needs consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe, and the onus of proving consent sits with the sender (sourced from the CRTC). That is general guidance, not legal advice, so talk to a lawyer if the audit turns up something serious.
The three price shapes you will run into
Audits come in roughly three shapes, and the shape tells you more than the number does.
Free. Usually a sales call with a tool report attached. A free audit can be a fine conversation, but it is rarely a diagnosis, because nobody can afford to read six systems for free. Treat it as a first meeting.
Fixed fee. A defined scope, a defined deliverable, a price agreed up front. Market figures vary widely. Web Tonic, a US firm that sells audits, puts a single-channel audit at US$2,500 to $7,500 and a comprehensive multi-channel audit at US$8,000 to $25,000 or more (sourced from Web Tonic). Those are US dollars and a seller's own ranges, so read them as a rough shape rather than a Canadian benchmark.
Fee credited against ongoing work. You pay for the audit, and if you go on to hire the same people, some or all of that fee comes off the first invoice. This is the shape I think is fairest to a founder, because it removes the incentive to make the audit a sales pitch: the audit has to be worth its fee on its own.
What separates a real audit from a sales call with a PDF
A few tells, in roughly the order you will notice them:
It asks for access before it talks about price. If nobody has asked to see your analytics or Search Console, nobody has read them.
Findings name your pages and your numbers. "Improve your SEO" is a horoscope. "These four docs pages get impressions for buyer queries and have no path to signup" is a finding.
The plan is in a set order. Fixing tracking before buying ads, or fixing indexing before writing more content, matters more than the list of things to fix.
It tells you what not to buy. An audit that concludes you need everything the auditor sells deserves a second look.
You can forward it. A written diagnosis your co-founder or board can read without you in the room is worth more than an hour of slides.
How I price mine
The studio's version is called the Diagnostic. It is one-time and fixed in scope: read access to your analytics, Search Console, CRM and the repo or CMS if you provide it, a written diagnosis you can forward, a sequenced 90-day plan, and one 60-minute call. If you start a retainer within 30 days, the whole fee comes off month one, which is the credited shape described above. The price and the credit terms are published, so you can compare them with anyone else's before we talk.
Before you pay for anyone's audit
If you are still deciding whether you need one at all, I have written about why an audit should come before paid ads. And if you do go ahead, the access list is close to what you would hand an agency at onboarding, so it is worth pulling together now either way.
The question to ask any auditor, including me, is simple: what will you read, and what will I have in writing at the end? What would your current marketing data tell an outsider in the first hour?