vCISO advisory
What security leadership actually costs
Security pricing is arithmetic, not opinion. A skilled security practitioner costs about $250/hour — the same math every firm quietly runs. This calculator just shows you the division.
Start with the physics
One number explains the entire market
Every security offer on earth is someone's hours. Hours come from people, and a person who can run a security program against an examiner's questions commands a floor of roughly $250/hour — loaded, before a company's overhead, tooling, and margin. When an offer can't be explained by that number, the hours aren't there. Drag the rate if you think we're wrong about the floor.
The floor for senior, examiner-tested security judgment.
What a real security function actually consumes.
A 20-hour-a-week security engagement runs north of $20,000 a month. That is not a price point — it is what twenty hours of skilled work costs, at any firm, under any business model.
Do the breakdown
Type in a budget. Divide it.
This is the question to ask of any security offer, ours included: how many hours of skilled work am I actually buying? Enter a monthly budget and watch it become hours.
What actually fits in 4.6 hrs/wk
Honest capability at this budget (shown at the 5-hour tier). What's crossed out isn't overpriced — it's simply not there.
None of this is a judgment about any particular vendor. Some low-budget offers are honest platform subscriptions for work your team then does. Some are real startups with real technology. The division still applies: whatever the invoice, the question is always "how many hours of skilled security judgment am I buying?" If nobody can answer that, you have a subscription — which can be fine, as long as you know what happens when something goes wrong at 2 a.m. on a Sunday.
Side-by-side comparison
Where the money actually goes
True Cost of a Full-Time CISO
- Base Salary
- $300,000
- Benefits & Taxes (~30%)
- $90,000
- Recruiting (amortized)
- $17,000
- Ramp/Onboarding Productivity Loss
- $45,000
- Outside Specialists Still Needed
- $35,000
- Total Loaded Cost
- $442,000
All-In Cost of a vCISO Engagement
- 20 hrs/wk × $250/hr
- $259,800
- Benefits & Taxes
- $0
- Recruiting Fees
- $0
- Ramp/Onboarding Cost
- $0
- Specialist Team Access
- $0
- Total Annual Cost
- $259,800
Zero overhead costs. Zero recruiting risk. Team access included. Scale up or down as needs change.
Typical engagement tiers
Where organizations usually land
Tiers are stated in hours per week, because that's the only unit that describes what you're getting. The dollar figures are the physics above, applied.
Advisory
Quarterly risk reviews, policy and insurance support, board reporting. A program that is steered, not run.
Embedded
A true fractional security leader: audits managed, vendors held accountable, exam prep continuous, board briefed on cadence.
Fractional Officer
Officer-level coverage for regulated institutions: examiner-facing, committee-ready, incident authority in writing.
All tiers include access to Principle Security's full specialist bench: compliance, pen testing, IR, GRC, and more.
Ready to talk numbers?
Every engagement starts with understanding your business, not selling you hours. Let's see if a vCISO is the right fit — and if the hours you need are the hours you can afford.
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