If you’re a startup founder, engineering leader, or security professional, you’ve likely faced the familiar challenge: your team needs security testing to satisfy compliance requirements, build customer trust, or simply validate that your systems are secure. The traditional answer has always been to hire a penetration testing firm, schedule an engagement weeks or months out, pay a substantial fee, and wait for a report.

But in today’s fast-paced development environment; where code ships daily, infrastructure changes constantly, and compliance frameworks demand rapid security validation; the traditional pentest model is starting to show its age.

This is where RedVeil comes in: an AI driven security testing platform that brings the rigor of professional penetration testing into your development workflow, on-demand, at a fraction of the cost. But how does it actually compare to a traditional pentest? Let’s break it down.

The Traditional Penetration Test: Powerful but Constrained

Traditional penetration testing has been the gold standard in security assessment for decades, and for good reason. When you hire a skilled penetration tester, you’re getting:

• Deep expertise: Professional penetration testers bring years of experience finding vulnerabilities across different systems and attack vectors.

• Creative thinking: Human intuition and creativity can uncover logic flaws and business logic vulnerabilities that automated tools might miss.

• Comprehensive reporting: A well-executed pentest delivers a narrative report explaining vulnerabilities in context, with remediation guidance tailored to your environment.

However, traditional pentests come with significant limitations that make them difficult to scale for modern development teams:

High Costs and Infrequent Testing

A single penetration test typically costs between $15,000 and $50,000 or more, depending on scope and complexity. For most startups and mid-sized companies, this means testing happens once or twice a year at best—often timed around compliance audits or major releases.

The problem? Your application doesn’t stay static between those annual tests. Every sprint introduces new features, new endpoints, new infrastructure, and potentially new vulnerabilities. By the time your next scheduled pentest rolls around, your attack surface has evolved considerably.

Scheduling Delays and Bottlenecks

Want to run a pentest next week? Unless you have an existing relationship with a firm, you’re probably looking at 4-8 weeks just to get on their calendar. During peak compliance season (typically Q4), that timeline can stretch even longer.

This creates a painful bottleneck: security testing becomes a gate that slows down product launches, delays customer onboarding, and turns into a source of friction between security and engineering teams.

Limited Scope and Time Constraints

Most traditional pentests are scoped to specific applications, networks, or time windows. A week-long web application pentest means the consultant has roughly 40 hours to map your application, identify vulnerabilities, exploit them, and document findings.

That’s a lot to accomplish, but it’s finite. Complex attack paths that require chaining multiple vulnerabilities together might not get explored fully. New features deployed during the engagement are often out of scope. And once the engagement ends, the testing stops—even if critical questions remain unanswered.

Point-in-Time Snapshots

A traditional pentest captures the security posture of your application at a specific moment in time. The report you receive reflects what was tested during that week in October—but what about the authentication refactor you shipped in November? Or the new API endpoints you deployed in December?

Without flexible testing, you’re left with uncertainty about whether new changes have introduced security regressions or whether previous fixes are still holding up.

RedVeil: On Demand Autonomous Security Testing

RedVeil takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of scheduling periodic external assessments, RedVeil embeds autonomous security testing directly into your development lifecycle; running whenever you need it, as often as you need it.

How RedVeil Works

At its core, RedVeil uses AI-powered security agents to autonomously explore your applications and infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities, and chain together multi-step attack paths—much like a human penetration tester would, but at machine speed and scale.

The platform tests across three primary domains:

• Web applications: Testing for OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, authentication flaws, authorization bypasses, and business logic issues

• Internal & External Network infrastructure: Scanning for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposed services, and lateral movement opportunities

• Cloud environments: Validating cloud security controls, IAM policies, and infrastructure-as-code configurations

* Stay tuned, we are excited to announce more testing types soon

The Key Differences

Let’s compare RedVeil and traditional pentesting across the dimensions that matter most to modern engineering teams:

Cost and Testing Cadence

Traditional Pentest: A single engagement costs $15K-$50K+. Most companies can afford this once or twice per year, which means 6-12 months between security validations. Additional retests to verify fixes often cost extra.

RedVeil: Flat annual subscription pricing gives you the flexibility to test on your schedule. Deploy a new feature? Run a test. Fixing a vulnerability? Validate the fix immediately. Preparing for an audit? Generate fresh evidence on demand.

The Real Cost Comparison

Let’s say you’re a Series A startup that needs quarterly security testing to satisfy SOC 2 requirements:

• Traditional approach: 4 pentests per year at $20K each = $80K annually (assuming you can even schedule them quarterly)

• RedVeil approach: An annual Pro subscription at $5,995, leading to over 90% cost savings
  
  

Beyond direct costs, consider the hidden expenses: engineering time coordinating with external consultants, delays waiting for scheduled engagements, the opportunity cost of slower product velocity. These factors often make traditional testing far more expensive than the invoice suggests.

Speed and Agility

Traditional Pentest: From deciding you need a test to receiving your report typically takes 6-10 weeks:

• 2-4 weeks: Scheduling and scoping

• 1-2 weeks: Active testing

• 2-4 weeks: Report generation and delivery

• Ongoing: Back-and-forth Q&A and clarifications
  
  

  
  

RedVeil: Get started testing within minutes. Findings surface in real-time as agents discover vulnerabilities. Detailed reports with reproduction steps are available immediately upon completion. Need to retest after a fix? Launch another scan instantly.

Coverage and Depth

Traditional Pentest: Coverage is bounded by time and scope. A consultant might spend 40-60 hours actively testing, which is enough to find common vulnerabilities but may not exhaustively explore complex attack chains. Testing is typically limited to the specific scope agreed upon in the statement of work.

RedVeil: Agents can run for as long as needed, testing thousands of attack vectors and automatically chaining vulnerabilities to map complete attack paths. Because the platform isn’t constrained by human time, it can exhaustively test endpoints, parameter combinations, and multi-step exploitation scenarios that might be skipped due to time constraints in a traditional test.

Evidence and Reporting

Traditional Pentest: You receive a PDF report (typically 30-100 pages) with vulnerability descriptions, risk ratings, and remediation recommendations. The report is narrative-driven, written for human consumption, and contains screenshots and logs as supporting evidence.

While comprehensive, traditional reports have limitations:

• Evidence quality varies by consultant

• Reproduction steps may be incomplete or ambiguous

• Reports are static documents that don’t update as you fix issues

• Difficult to integrate into issue tracking systems

RedVeil: Every vulnerability finding includes:

• Precise reproduction steps: Step-by-step technical instructions to reproduce the issue

• Proof-of-concept code: Working exploits and attack payloads

• Request/response logs: Complete HTTP traffic, API calls, and system interactions

• Live remediation tracking: Mark issues as fixed and retest in one click

Audit-Ready Documentation

RedVeil’s reports are designed specifically for compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS. Auditors want to see:

1. Evidence of regular security testing (RedVeil’s on demand testing model satisfies this)

2. Clear documentation of what was tested and when (every scan produces timestamped evidence)

3. Proof that vulnerabilities were identified and fixed (remediation tracking)

4. Validation testing after fixes (one click retesting)
   
   

Because RedVeil can test on-demand, you can generate fresh security testing evidence right before your audit, proving your current security posture rather than relying on a six-month-old pentest report.

When to Use Each Approach

Despite RedVeil’s advantages, traditional penetration testing still has its place. Here’s how to think about when to use each:

Use Traditional Pentesting When:

• You need human creativity: Novel vulnerability research, complex business logic flaws, and sophisticated social engineering scenarios still benefit from human expertise

• Compliance mandates it: Some frameworks or customer contracts specifically require third-party penetration testing from certified professionals. For organizations that need human attestation for compliance purposes, RedVeil offers an optional attestation service where security professionals review and validate the AI-generated findings.

• Deep red team exercises: Advanced adversary simulation and purple team exercises require human attackers
  
  

Use RedVeil When:

• You need flexible validation: Testing that works with your sprints, deployments, or infrastructure changes

• Speed matters: Fast-moving development cycles, pre-customer demos, or urgent compliance needs

• You’re cost-constrained: Startups and smaller teams that can’t afford frequent traditional pentests

• You want comprehensive coverage: Testing large attack surfaces, many microservices, or complex cloud environments

• You’re fixing vulnerabilities: Validating that security fixes actually work before deploying to production

• You need fresh audit evidence: Generating current security testing documentation for auditors or customers

Conclusion

Traditional penetration testing has served the security industry well for decades, and it’s not going away. The expertise, creativity, and deep analysis that skilled penetration testers bring remain valuable, especially for complex security assessments and compliance requirements.

But for modern engineering teams building cloud-native applications with continuous deployment pipelines, the traditional model has clear limitations: it’s too slow, too expensive, and too infrequent to keep pace with development velocity.

RedVeil represents a new approach—one where security testing is flexible, autonomous, and keeps up with your team. It’s not about replacing human expertise entirely; it’s about making professional-grade security testing accessible whenever you need it, at a price point that makes frequent validation practical.

Whether you choose to adopt RedVeil as your primary testing solution, use it to complement periodic traditional pentests, or start with RedVeil before graduating to more expensive external assessments, the key insight remains: security testing needs to match the pace of modern development.

The question isn’t whether your application needs security testing; it’s whether that testing can keep up with how fast you’re building.

Ready to Experience Flexible Security Testing?

RedVeil makes enterprise-grade penetration testing accessible to engineering teams of all sizes. Get started in minutes—no scheduling calls, no waiting weeks, no massive upfront costs.

Here’s what you get:

• AI-powered agents that autonomously test your web apps, networks, and cloud infrastructure

• Real exploitable findings with complete reproduction steps—not just scanner noise

• Multi-step attack path mapping that reveals the true blast radius of vulnerabilities

• Compliance-ready reports for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more

• Unlimited testing runs to validate fixes, test new features, and maintain continuous security

• On-demand evidence generation for audits, customer security reviews, and compliance frameworks
  
  

Join engineering teams who’ve already made the switch to flexible, autonomous security testing. Because in modern software development, security can’t wait weeks—it needs to happen now.