Here’s what DevSecOps actually costs before a sales deck complicates it: a managed retainer runs $2,500 to $5,000 a month for a small team, $6,000 to $15,000 mid-market, and $25,000-plus at enterprise scale. A one-time secure CI/CD build lands $15,000 to $40,000. Security controls add 20% to 40% on top of a plain DevOps engagement. If you’re shipping software that touches customer or payment data and none of that is in your pipeline yet, reach out and we’ll scope the smallest version that closes your real gaps.
We’re gmware, a software development firm headquartered in Austin, TX with engineering centers in Bangalore and Mohali, India. We build and secure production systems, and we operate our own retail-intelligence product, Shield Suite, across 60,000-plus storefronts, so the “wire security into the pipeline” advice below is how we run our own code. Below: the real rate bands, what a secure pipeline includes, and the shift-left math that tells you whether the spend pays back.
DevSecOps cost at a glance
What DevSecOps services cost in 2026
Two things drive the number: whether you want a one-time build or an ongoing retainer, and where the engineers sit. Here are the published 2026 bands.
| Engagement | What you’re buying | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Secure pipeline assessment and roadmap | Where your SDLC leaks, prioritized | $5,000 to $20,000 |
| Secure CI/CD build (one-time) | SAST, SCA, secrets, IaC checks, gates | $15,000 to $40,000 |
| Managed retainer, small team | Monitoring, maintenance, security support | $2,500 to $5,000/mo |
| Managed retainer, mid-market | Same, more surface area | $6,000 to $15,000/mo |
| Managed retainer, enterprise | Full program, compliance-grade | $25,000+/mo |
The hourly picture explains why the offshore-versus-onshore call moves the total so much. Senior DevOps and security engineers bill $180 to $300-plus an hour in the US and Canada, against $50 to $80 for senior India delivery. Specialized roles like Kubernetes security specialists carry a 20% to 30% premium on top. Our own model puts senior India engineers on the work with Austin architecture and oversight, which is why our secure-pipeline quotes tend to land under US-only shops without the coordination tax of a pure offshore bid.
What “DevSecOps” adds over plain DevOps
The “Sec” is the whole cost difference, and it’s a specific list, not a vibe. Security requirements raise a DevOps engagement by 20% to 40% in regulated industries because you’re adding:
- SAST (static application security testing) in the pipeline, catching insecure code on every commit
- SCA (software composition analysis) flagging vulnerable dependencies before they ship
- Secrets scanning so an AWS key never lands in a public repo
- IaC security checks on your Terraform and Kubernetes configs before they provision anything
- Container image scanning for known CVEs
- Policy gates that block a merge when a critical finding shows up
The step cheap setups skip is tuning. A scanner set to shout about everything gets ignored inside a week, and an ignored scanner is worse than none because it looks like coverage. Half the value of a real DevSecOps engagement is making the signal trustworthy enough that engineers act on it. If your broader concern is a full risk picture, our cybersecurity consulting overview covers the assessment side that usually runs first.
The shift-left math: why earlier is cheaper
Here’s the argument that justifies the whole category. The Systems Sciences Institute at IBM found it costs about 6x more to fix a defect in implementation than in design, and 15x more when it surfaces in testing. Security bugs follow the same curve, only worse, because the “production” version of the mistake is a breach.
Cost to fix a defect by phase
Now put a dollar sign on the production version. The average US data breach cost hit $10.22M in 2025, a record high, against a $4.44M global average. You don’t need to prevent a ten-million-dollar breach every year for a $40K pipeline build and a modest retainer to pay for itself. You need to catch one vulnerable dependency or one leaked credential before it ships. DevSecOps is cheap insurance measured against that number, expensive theater measured against nothing.
When you don’t need a full DevSecOps program
An honest fork, because we’d rather scope you correctly than oversell. You probably don’t need a $25K-a-month enterprise program if:
- You’re pre-launch with no production data yet (get the basics in cheaply, scale later)
- Your app is internal-only, low-sensitivity, behind a corporate VPN
- You already have a security engineer and just need pipeline setup, not a managed team
In those cases the right buy is the one-time $15K to $40K secure-pipeline build plus a light monthly retainer, not a full outsourced program. Scale the retainer when your data sensitivity, compliance obligations, or attack surface actually grows. Buying enterprise DevSecOps for a five-person startup is the security equivalent of a home alarm system on a tent.
How gmware runs DevSecOps
We start with a pipeline assessment: where your SDLC leaks, ranked by how likely each gap is to become an incident. That tells us the smallest set of controls that closes your real exposure, instead of a checklist you’ll pay for and ignore. Then we wire those controls in and tune them until the findings are trustworthy.
Delivery runs through our cybersecurity and DevOps and infrastructure practices: senior engineers in Bangalore and Mohali, security architecture and accountability in Austin, working hours that overlap yours. Because we secure our own production systems, the pipeline we set up for you is the one we trust for our own code.
Tell us what you’re shipping and what data it touches. Reach out and we’ll give you a straight answer on scope, cost, and timeline within 48 hours.