Ask five studios what a UX audit costs and you will get five numbers between nothing and several lakh rupees, because the phrase covers three different jobs. Before any of the numbers mean anything, you have to know which job you are buying.
Here is what we charge, what sits inside each tier, and the handful of things that genuinely change the figure. The current prices always live on the audit page; treat that as the source of truth if the two ever drift apart.
The three things people call an audit
A checklist review. Two designers walk your live product against a fixed set of checks on desktop and mobile and send back findings ranked by impact, each with a screenshot and a suggested fix. Ours is the free 15-point audit: one product, one working day, plus a half-hour call to walk through the top items. It is free because a real audit sells the work that follows better than a pitch does.
A full audit. Every flow, every state, with a usability test alongside it and a roadmap your team can execute. Ours starts at ₹85,000 and includes a flow-by-flow review, a test with five real users, a roadmap with effort and impact against each item, and a Figma file of the proposed fixes.
A fix sprint. Not an audit at all: two weeks of design work on the top findings, redesigned screens in Figma and developer handoff. From ₹1,50,000. It costs more than the audit because finding a problem and drawing the answer are different amounts of work.
Most of the confusion in pricing conversations is someone comparing a quote for the third against a quote for the first.
What actually moves the number
Flows, not screens
Screen count is the metric everyone reaches for and it is close to useless. A forty-page marketing site is usually six templates. A twelve-screen dashboard can be four separate products.
Count flows instead: the distinct routes a person takes to finish something. Sign up. Invite a colleague. Change a plan. Export a report. Each one has to be walked start to finish, on a real device, with a real account.
User roles
This is the biggest multiplier and the one teams forget in the brief. If an admin, a manager and a client each sign in to a different arrangement of the same product, that is three audits wearing one login screen. We designed a compliance dashboard where the client switcher sits in the top bar rather than the sidebar, because almost every task in the product starts by choosing whose records you are in. A product shaped like that cannot be reviewed from one seat.
Modules
The Disk Manager carries incident reports, analytics, reporting, learning, communication, audits and history in one application. Seven modules is not one product to review; it is seven, sharing a sidebar. Scope a platform like that by module and quote per module, or the estimate is fiction before it is sent.
Platforms
Web, iOS and Android are three passes, not one with two quick checks. The same task solved three ways fails three different ways, and the mobile version usually fails harder because the flow was designed for a desktop and then squeezed.
Conditional paths
Forms with branches are quietly expensive. A vehicle registration flow we designed runs seven numbered steps, and answering yes to a trailer or a commercial vehicle reveals four more fields that nobody else ever sees. Every branch is a path somebody has to walk, and the branches nobody walks are exactly where the broken validation lives.
Whether real users are involved
Adding a usability test means recruiting people who match your actual users, scheduling them, running the sessions and writing up what happened. It is the single largest line item in a full audit and the reason the paid tier costs what it does. It is also the only part that tells you what users believe rather than what they bump into.
Whether you want the fixes drawn
A finding says the empty dashboard gives a new user nothing to do. A fix is the designed empty state, in Figma, with the copy written and the button labelled, ready for a developer. Studios that bundle the second into the price of the first are quoting for the sprint.
What you can actually get into
A test account with realistic data in it is worth more than any brief. An empty sandbox hides the screens that only exist once there are four thousand rows in the table, and those are usually the screens with the problem. If the auditor has to work from screenshots because access takes three weeks of legal review, the estimate goes up and the findings get worse.
How specialised the work is
Reviewing a grocery site is not reviewing a trading app. In a mobile trading product, every tap moves money, buy and sell are the only two full-width buttons in the whole app, and green and red are reserved strictly for direction so nothing decorative can be mistaken for a price movement. To review that usefully, someone first has to understand the job. The same is true of compliance tools, clinical software and anything where the user is licensed to do what they are doing. Learning time is real time.
What barely moves it
Page count on a content site. Two hundred blog posts on six templates is six templates.
How ugly it currently is. Visual quality and usability are only loosely related. Some of the tidiest interfaces we have reviewed were the hardest to use, and a plain one with a clear primary action often audits well.
Your industry, mostly. The exception is the specialist domains above. Otherwise a sign-up form is a sign-up form.
Whether you have a design system. Having one makes consistency findings shorter, since the same button exists once rather than eleven times. It does not change the flow work, which is most of the job.
Estimate your own scope before you ask for a quote
Write down three numbers: how many distinct flows a user can complete, how many roles see a materially different product, how many platforms you ship. Multiply them. That figure, not your screen count, is what a studio is really pricing.
Then decide which of these you want at the end: a ranked list you will execute yourselves, a roadmap with effort and impact for a team that needs to plan a quarter, or designed screens ready to build. They cost different amounts because they are different work, and being clear about which one you want will save you more money than negotiating on the day rate.
The cheapest useful next step
Run the free version first, on the one flow that matters most to your business. Send a live URL or a test account and the fifteen ranked findings come back within one working day, at which point you will know whether a paid audit is worth quoting at all. If you would rather do a first pass yourself this week, the checklist we run is published in full.