Hidden costs
Hidden LLM / AI Application Security Costs
What the vendor pricing page does not tell you. Latency overhead, false-positive remediation, SIEM logging, on-call coverage, procurement cycle time.
50-300ms
Per-call latency budget
5-15%
Typical false-positive rate at launch
1-3 mo
Procurement cycle for quote-only vendors
24/7
On-call expectation
The six hidden line items
- Per-call latency overhead: 50-300 ms extra per LLM round trip.
- False-positive remediation: engineer time tuning policies and exception lists.
- SIEM logging: guardrail decisions need to land in your existing SIEM.
- SOC on-call: AI security alerts deserve the same triage as other security alerts.
- Procurement cycle: quote-only vendors take weeks before first invoice.
- Eval CI: regression-test the guardrail on every release.
Hidden-cost ledger (annual, mid-market illustrative)
Illustrative example, not a real company- 01.SIEM ingest premium$18,000
- 02.False-positive remediation engineer (0.15 FTE)$36,000
- 03.Latency-overhead inference$12,000
- 04.Procurement / legal cycle$15,000
- 05.SOC on-call delta$24,000
Hidden total$105,000
Last verified June 2026Source: vendor pricing pages. See /methodology.