How to price a continuity review
The most common pricing mistake with a new service line is pricing the effort — 'it takes me three hours, so…'. Continuity reviews particularly punish this, because good tooling collapses the effort while the value stays anchored to what's at stake: the client's domain, revenue channels, and continuity itself.
We won't pretend there's a market-standard number — the honest answer is that this category is young and firms price it against their own client base. What exists is a solid framework: three models, a scoping axis, and the anchors that make your number feel obvious instead of negotiable.
The three models
- 1Per-review, flat feeA fixed price per review engagement (discover → interview → report → fix plan). Easiest to sell first, easiest to scope, and the natural pilot structure. Weakness: no recurring revenue between reviews — you're re-selling every cycle.
- 2Continuity retainerMonthly fee covering the annual/semi-annual review plus continuous monitoring (renewals, drift, departure support) between them. This is the model the service wants to live in: the monitoring alerts justify the retainer monthly, and the review is the retainer's headline event.
- 3Bundled into the MSA tierFold the review into your top service tier as a differentiator. Costs you margin on paper, but it upgrades clients into the tier and hardens retention — the score history becomes switching cost. Best for MSPs defending against commoditised per-seat pricing.
Scope by estate, not by seat
Seats are the wrong axis — a 10-person e-commerce brand with Shopify, three ad platforms, and six marketing tools is a bigger continuity estate than a 40-person firm living entirely in one tenant. Tier by asset count from the discovery scan (the scan is free to run, so you can quote from evidence): a small/standard/complex banding keeps quoting fast and defensible, and re-tiering at renewal is automatic — the register tells you the estate grew.
What's in, what's a project
- In the review price: discovery, the interview, the scored branded report, the fix plan, and a findings walkthrough meeting.
- Billed as projects: the actual remediation — domain transfers, tenant admin restructuring, portfolio migrations, offboarding cleanups. Each finding in the report is effectively a pre-sold, pre-justified quote.
- In the retainer (if that model): monitoring, alert triage, departure reports when someone leaves, and the cadence management.
- Never in scope: being the permanent owner of the client's accounts. You hold delegated access; the client holds root — you of all people shouldn't become their key-person risk.
The anchors that justify the number
Price against the alternative and the consequence, never the hours. The alternative: a manual audit of the same scope is days of senior time at consulting rates — automation is your margin, not the client's discount. The consequence: one lapsed domain or hijacked payment account costs more than a decade of reviews; the review is insurance-priced, and (usefully) it's also literal insurance homework — it produces the documentation cyber-insurance applications now demand.
Two tactical notes. Pilot pricing: discount your first three, but never free — a price, even reduced, is what makes the findings a deliverable instead of a favor. And present the score, then the price: 'you're a 54; here's what getting to 85 looks like' reorders the conversation so the number answers a problem the client has already seen.
The free scan maps your domain, email, cloud, social and tools from public records — and shows what you'd lose access to tomorrow. No login, nothing to install.
Check my business