How Much Does a vCISO Cost? The vCICO Pricing Guide

If you’re hiring a Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) or fractional CISO on a monthly retainer, you can expect to pay between $3,000 to $20,000 per month, depending on a variety of factors including scope of work, industry, company size, and more (more on this below).

For on-demand tasks or smaller projects, you can expect hourly rates of $200-400.

Hiring a vCISO is a great option for smaller or fast-growing companies that don’t need to bring in a full-time CISO. And though the costs may seem expensive, what a vCISO can unlock for your business makes them valuable.

When you're staring down a six-figure deal stalled in procurement, the real cost isn't the vCISO's retainer. It's the cost of your own time (worth ~$1,000/hour) and the daily compounding cost of that blocked revenue.

In this article, we’ll break down what your organization can expect to pay for a vCISO, what impacts those costs, and the value a good vCISO will bring to your organization.

vCISO Pricing Models

A vCISO provides the leadership of a senior security executive, but on a flexible basis. The pricing is not one-size-fits-all and typically falls into three models.

1. Monthly Retainer

A monthly retainer is the most common way to work with a vCISO. With this type of agreement, you’ll get a dedicated security expert (or small team) to support your organization on things like strategic guidance and leadership, security program management, penetration testing, audit readiness, policy development, and vendor risk management.

This type of relationship often works well for startups and SMBs (typically sub-100 employees) who need continuous security leadership and compliance management to pass audits (like SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA) and unblock sales, but don’t have the need for an in-house CISO.

Price: $3,000-20,000 per month.

2. Hourly Rates

An hourly model allows you to pay per hour for more ad-hoc vCISO services. This type of arrangement often works best for agreements covering work that can be completed in a fixed time period. For example, reviewing your security policies, incident response planning, or running a risk assessment.

Hourly arrangements are more flexible than month-to-month retainer agreements, however, it often leads to a much more advisory type of service because the vCISO isn’t leading tasks and assumes accountability within your organization. You’re also often paying a premium for a smaller number of hours compared to a retainer or project-based partnership.  

Price: $200 - $400+ per hour.

3. Project-Based Fee

With a project-based agreement a vCISO will charge a flat rate for the delivery of an agreed service or set of deliverables regardless of the number of hours it takes to complete. This often works best for projects like audit prep or security reviews.

A project-based agreement means you can budget exactly how much a project will cost your business. However, there’s not much scope for tackling unforeseen issues in these types of partnerships.

Price: $5,000 – $50,000+ per project.

Why You Shouldn’t Go it Alone

There’s no getting around it, a vCISO is expensive. But when you consider the cost of doing it yourself, they’re actually very cost-effective. The $0 "cost" of doing it yourself is an illusion. The real, hidden cost is your (the founder's) time, which is the single most valuable and expensive asset in your company.

Paul Graham has been quoted as saying that founder time is worth, conservatively, $1,000 an hour. This is time that should be spent on product, sales, and hiring.

Let's say you buy a compliance platform like Vanta or Drata, thinking it's an out of the box solution. But you still have to do the work. You are the one chasing engineers for evidence, trying to write 20+ security policies from templates, and sitting on endless audit calls.

A "simple" SOC 2 will consume at least 10 hours of your time per month, probably more.

That's $10,000 of your time spent on a task an expert could do faster and better. A $5,000/month vCISO is literally a 50% discount on your own time.

The Risk of Inexperience

"But I'm smart, I can figure it out." Of course you can. But an expert vCISO's value isn't just in knowing what to do, it's in knowing what not to do.

When answering a security questionnaire, for example, an inexperienced person might "helpfully" provide extra details about a system which leads to multiple rounds of back-and-forth. An inexperienced founder may think your whole system needs to be audited, whereas an expert would understand how you can create an enclave around sensitive data to save time and money.

When you work with a vCISO you’re paying for someone who’s been there and done it before. They have learned lessons and wisdom ready to share to save your business from making mistakes.

What Are You Actually Paying For?

When it comes to valuing vCISO’s work, I tend to bucket into three areas:

1. Speed to Revenue

Any growing business will know the pain of having a big enterprise deal stuck in procurement due to a questionnaire backlog or the pain of answering “Do you have SOC 2?” from every potential buyer in your funnel.

With an experienced vCISO you can build systems that get you to revenue faster. Whether that’s implementing tools to help speed up questionnaires or guiding your team to get audit ready, a vCISO can help you close more deals, faster.

2. Certainty of an Outcome

Audits are stressful and a failed audit is a disaster. It costs more time, more money, and puts deals at risk. When you work with a vCISO who’s been there and done it before, you’re paying for success.

3. Sales Enablement

Your sales team is constantly bogged down by security questionnaires they aren't qualified to answer. A vCISO service takes this entire bottleneck off their plate. They build a knowledge base, use tools correctly, and help your team turn questionnaires around in 24-48 hours, not weeks.

For example, at Workstreet, we helped Granola handle security questionnaires 10x faster.

What Determines the Cost of a vCISO?

Scope of Work

Is the vCISO just providing strategic advice? Or are they also managing your entire audit, running your vendor risk program, completing all security questionnaires, and conducting employee training? The more hands-on work, the higher the retainer.

The scope of work often has the biggest direct impact on costs. As you request more from your virtual CISO, the costs will go up.

Your company sizes can also impact the scope of work. For example, a 15-person, single-product startup will have fewer cybersecurity demands than a 150-person company with multiple product lines, legacy systems, and international data flows.

You should also consider the engagement duration as a short term contract may come at a higher premium than a longer term 12-month retainer contract, which offers more stability for the vCISO firm.

Industry and Compliance Needs

The type of organization also has a bearing on the cost of a vCISO. For example, if you’re in healthcare you’ll also need to consider HIPAA regulations or if you’re in the Defence Industrial Base, CMMC will come into play — these compliance frameworks can add much more complexity than a startup that needs to work towards SOC 2 to serve enterprise customers.

A simple SOC 2 Type 1 for a B2B SaaS is the entry point. The price increases as you add more complex or overlapping frameworks, such as ISO 27001, HIPAA (for HealthTech), CMMC Level 2 (for Defense contractors), or GDPR.

Experience and Expertise

A vCISO firm with a documented 100% audit success rate and deep expertise in your specific industry (e.g., Fintech) will command a premium over a generalist consultant. You're paying for their proven track record.

When selecting a vCISO, you also need to make sure they have the correct certifications. These include:

• CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional)
• CRISC (Certification in Risk and Information Systems Control)
• CCISO (Certified Chief Information Security Officer)
• CISM (Certified Information Security Manager)

So, How Much Should You Pay a vCISO?

We’ve broken down the cost structures and what influences those costs. To recap:

• A monthly retainer could cost from $3,000 to $20,000 per month.
• For on-demand tasks or smaller projects, you can expect hourly rates of $200-400.
• Project-based agreements can cost from $5,000-50,000+.

Oftentimes, a vCISO will be a fraction of the cost of brining in a full-time CISO to your organization.

However, I’d also like to reframe the question. Focusing solely on vCISO cost is the wrong way to look at the problem. The real cost is the $10,000 in founder time you're wasting every month and the six-figure deals stalled in your pipeline.

A great vCISO will help your organization build a sustainable security posture and ensure your cybersecurity strategy matches your business objectives. When you finally are ready to hire that first full-time security leader (at 80-100+ employees), you'll have a mature program and a clear playbook for them to run, making that hire more successful from day one.

At Workstreet, we offer a dedicated security team that scales with your needs without the need for internal executive overhead or oversight. This is most effective for companies that either aren’t ready for a full time executive or want to augment specific elements of their security program. Learn more about our virtual CISO services here.