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How EU Web Agencies Should Price EAA Compliance in 2026 (and Why Most Get It Wrong)

Most EU agencies sell accessibility as a €2k one-off audit. That undersells the work and the recurring liability. Here is the right pricing structure, with benchmarks.

8 May 2026

13 min read

Ravid, Webply

The mistake almost everyone is making

Walk through ten European agency websites that mention accessibility. You will see the same pattern: a single line item, "WCAG 2.1 AA Audit — from €1,500", on the services page.

This pricing is wrong for three independent reasons.

First, it confuses an audit with a compliance program. An audit is a snapshot. EAA compliance is an ongoing legal obligation. The client who buys "an audit" thinks they are buying compliance; what they are buying is a printed deck that documents the moment in time at which you ran the scan. Two months later, after a theme update, three new components, and a third-party chat widget added by marketing, the audit is stale and the legal obligation is not.

Second, it leaves money on the table. The legal risk that the client is actually buying protection from is not "we got cited once" — it is "we became non-compliant, then a competitor / Verbraucherzentrale / consumer found it and started a process". Protection from a continuous risk has continuous value. Buyers of compliance services in adjacent fields (GDPR, financial reporting, ISO 27001) all pay recurring retainers because that's what continuous protection costs to deliver. Accessibility should be the same.

Third, it misframes the buyer. A €1,500 audit lives in the marketing budget. A €2,000/month compliance retainer lives in the legal/operations budget. The legal/operations budget is bigger, longer-cycle, and less price-sensitive. The same engagement, framed differently, ends up with very different P&L outcomes for the agency.

If you do nothing else after reading this, change the framing. Sell ongoing compliance, priced monthly, framed as legal risk management.

The four-tier pricing structure that actually works

Here is the structure I recommend agencies use. Adjust prices to your market, but keep the structure.

Tier 1 — Free QuickScan (sales tool)

• What it is: 60-second automated scan of the prospect's homepage + 1-2 key pages. Output: a one-page summary highlighting the 3-5 biggest issues by legal risk.
• Purpose: Lead qualification, not revenue. The prospect sees a real problem, you have established expertise, and you have a concrete starting point for the sales conversation.
• Cost to deliver: ~€0 if you use a tool that produces shareable reports. ~5 min of your time per prospect.
• Pricing: free.

Tier 2 — Compliance Audit Report

• What it is: Written report covering 30-100 representative pages. Combines automated scanning with manual review of the load-bearing flows (homepage, signup, account, checkout, contact). Output: prioritised findings ranked by legal risk + remediation recommendations + an accessibility statement template.
• Purpose: Establish the gap. Give the client a concrete to-do list. Set up the remediation engagement.
• Pricing benchmark:
  • Small site (1-30 pages, simple): €1,500 – €3,500
  • Medium site (30-150 pages, e-commerce): €3,500 – €8,000
  • Large site (150+ pages, complex SPA, multiple stakeholders): €8,000 – €20,000
• Delivery time: 1-3 weeks depending on size.

Tier 3 — Remediation

• What it is: Implementing the fixes. Either developer hours billed against the audit findings, or a fixed-scope project to bring the site to a target conformance level.
• Purpose: Turn the audit into compliance. This is where the bulk of the revenue lives.
• Pricing benchmark:
  • Time and materials: €100-180/hour for senior accessibility-fluent dev work in continental Europe
  • Fixed scope (closing all critical/serious findings on a medium e-commerce site): €8,000 – €25,000
• Why hourly often beats fixed-scope here: scope creeps. The audit finds 80 issues; halfway through fixing them, the client wants the new design system to also be accessible; that's another 40 issues. T&M with a clear hour cap and weekly check-ins protects everyone.

Tier 4 — Ongoing Compliance Retainer (the actual product)

• What it is: Monthly engagement covering: automated re-scans across templates, regression triage, an updated accessibility statement, a quarterly progress report, and 2-6 hours of remediation time per month for new issues.
• Purpose: Recurring revenue + the only thing that actually delivers continuous compliance.
• Pricing benchmark:
  • Light retainer (small site, monthly scan + quarterly review): €300 – €800/month
  • Standard retainer (medium e-commerce, monthly scan + 4h dev): €800 – €2,500/month
  • Premium retainer (large enterprise, multi-stakeholder, monthly scan + 10h dev + workshop quarterly): €2,500 – €6,500/month
• Why this is the prize: predictable revenue, continuous client engagement, plus you are the hero when their compliance officer or legal counsel asks "what are we doing about EAA". And — practically — the only way the client actually stays compliant is if someone is doing this work month over month.

How to position the retainer (this is the hard part)

The retainer conversation is harder than the audit conversation. Audits feel like a project. Retainers feel like an ongoing cost. To win this, you need to reframe the buying lens.

Don't sell scanning. Sell sleep.

The retainer is not "we run a scan every month for €1,500". It is: "if a competitor or consumer finds a violation on your site and threatens action, you have documented proof that you maintained ongoing accessibility hygiene, plus the team that fixes it within days. The cost is one €4,000 Abmahnung divided across 12 months, plus protection."

For German clients specifically, the Abmahnung dynamic is a powerful frame: the retainer is cheaper than a single Abmahnung, and the retainer documents the diligence that defends against one (see Germany's fine regime for the statutory numbers). For Austrian clients, the BGStG Schlichtungsverfahren plays the same role — see Austria's fine regime for context.

For multi-country clients, the country-by-country fines breakdown is a good supporting document — it makes the abstract liability concrete in numbers per market.

Where agencies usually give the client a discount they shouldn't

Three pricing leaks I see repeatedly:

1. Bundling the audit with site builds for free. "We'll throw in the accessibility audit." This trains the client to think audits are free and creates a precedent for future scope. Either don't do an audit at launch, or charge for it as a clear line item — even at a friends-and-family rate.

2. Charging frontend rate for accessibility work. A senior frontend developer in Berlin charges €120/hour for a Next.js feature. The same person doing accessibility remediation should charge €150-180/hour because the work requires (a) a specialised body of knowledge, (b) testing with assistive technology that not every dev can do, (c) higher liability exposure for the agency if the work is wrong.

3. Skipping the accessibility statement. This is a 2-page document. It is also, in France, the difference between "in compliance" and "fined €25,000/year". Agencies routinely deliver a fully remediated site without a published statement, which leaves the client legally exposed and leaves €500-1,500 of revenue on the table.

Things to put in your contract

Three contract terms that protect the agency and have become standard in accessibility engagements:

• Scope by URL pattern, not "the entire site": "All pages matching /shop/* and /account/* as of the audit date". When marketing launches a new section in month 4, that's a new engagement, not creep.
• Re-test included only for findings you fixed: if the client makes their own changes between your audit and re-test, those are out of scope or billed separately. Otherwise you are auditing their work for free.
• Liability limited to fees paid: standard for any consultancy work but particularly important here. Compliance is a moving target across 27 jurisdictions, and you cannot guarantee no-complaint outcomes.

On overlay widgets, briefly

Some agencies are tempted by the "AccessiBe / UserWay / EqualWeb partner program" route — install one line of JavaScript, charge the client a managed fee, take a referral fee from the overlay vendor. This is a bad business decision for agencies for three reasons:

• The overlay does not fix the underlying source code, so the client remains exposed to complaints — which will land on your reputation, not the overlay vendor's.
• US litigation has proceeded against sites with overlays installed; EU regulators have not endorsed overlays as a compliance route.
• Once the client has the overlay, they no longer need you. The recurring revenue you could have captured with a real retainer goes to the overlay vendor.

Real remediation work + real retainer = better business and better outcomes. Detailed argument in our top 10 violations post, section "On overlay widgets, again".