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Cost model

LLM Security Cost: The Full Spend Model for a Production LLM Feature

Add up runtime guardrails, red teaming, eval tooling, on-call coverage, latency-overhead infrastructure and training. Below is an illustrative breakdown.

6
Spend buckets
$60K-$1M+
Annual range (illustrative)
0.5-3 FTE
Typical AI-security headcount
300ms
Typical guardrail latency budget

Six spend buckets

  • Runtime guardrails (hyperscaler-native or specialist).
  • Red teaming (one-off or continuous).
  • Eval tooling (open source or Promptfoo Enterprise).
  • On-call coverage (SOC integration).
  • Latency-overhead infra (additional inference budget for guardrail calls).
  • Training and policy authoring (engineer time on Colang / validators / RFP work).
Mid-market LLM feature, illustrative annual cost
Illustrative example, not a real company
  1. 01.Hyperscaler guardrail at 50M calls / yr(Bedrock prompt-attack)$48,000
  2. 02.Specialist runtime guardrail subscription(Lakera Pro illustrative midpoint)$60,000
  3. 03.External AI red-team engagement(One-off, midpoint)$40,000
  4. 04.Eval engineer (0.5 FTE)($240K / yr fully loaded)$120,000
  5. 05.SIEM logging and SOC overlap$25,000
  6. 06.Latency-overhead inference$15,000
Year-1 illustrative spend$308,000
Illustrative example, not a real company

For 1-year and 3-year breakdowns at three org sizes, see /tco.

Last verified June 2026Source: vendor pricing pages. See /methodology.