Security Awareness Training Price Guide For 2024

In this guide, we'll cover everything you need to know about security awareness training costs in 2024.

We'll deep-dive into various influencing factors and outline how company size, time commitment, and provider types can impact the price you'll be expected to pay. If you want to cut cybersecurity training costs, this article will equip you with much-needed information.

How Much Does Security Awareness Training Cost?

In 2024, you can expect to pay between USD$0.45 and USD$4 monthly per employee for security awareness training. Where exactly you land in this price range depends on the type of provider you choose, the size of your business, and the commitment you make (i.e., a monthly, annual, or multi-year purchase).

Let's dive into these factors to understand their impact on the overall cost of running security awareness training.

The Types Of Security Awareness Training Vendors

There are four types of security awareness training vendors. It's important to flag this because the type of provider you choose has an impact on the price you can expect to pay.

Option 1. Modern Security Awareness Training Vendors

Using a modern vendor is the most cost-efficient way to conduct security awareness training.

Typically, these vendors maintain profitability by following a low-margin, high-volume business model and do this by implementing two practices:

• Minimizing Customer Acquisition Costs: Vendors do this by using organic marketing and making the product extremely accessible. For example, vendors who capitalize on customer referrals and implement a perpetual free tier subscription can avoid the need to use dedicated sales professionals.
• Minimizing Ongoing Support Costs: Vendors do this by providing customers with all the information, tools, and educational content needed to implement and maintain their security awareness training program. This minimizes the need for customers to contact support teams, which means vendors require less support staff.

This approach to cost minimization is typically a win-win for all parties. The vendor can save on operational expenditure, offer a low-cost alternative to legacy and niche training vendors, and still remain profitable. The downside of this approach is that customers may need to upskill during the onboarding process.

Depending on the size of your business and the commitment you make, you can expect to pay between USD$0.45 and USD$1.25 monthly per employee.

Option 2. Legacy Security Awareness Training Vendors

Legacy security awareness training vendors have been the only option for the past decade. These vendors are typically more rigid in their onboarding process, which comes with benefits and downsides.

The typical onboarding process for the platforms offered by these vendors is to:

1. Register interest in an evaluation
2. Receive a demonstration of the platform
3. Speak with a sales representative for pricing (public pricing may not be available)
4. Onboard the platform with assistance from technical support
5. Have monthly or quarterly check-ins from customer success

Using these vendors does come at a premium cost, which is the main downside. You will need to make an annual or multi-year commitment and can expect to pay between USD$0.90 and USD$4.00 monthly per employee.

Option 3. Niche Security Awareness Training Vendors

Niche training vendors have been and always will be a solid option for conducting security awareness training. These vendors are typically expensive but have some of the most in-depth training capabilities available.

They are typically consultants in your country or region and have hands-on, relevant knowledge of your industry or business requirements. For example, they may thoroughly understand your compliance or privacy obligations or know trending pertinent threats to your business.

They will typically offer a variety of training solutions depending on your business needs. For example, the training may be virtual or in-person and use software platforms to help power their security awareness training offering.

When using a niche training vendor, expect to pay between USD$3.00 and USD$6.00 monthly per employee.

Option 4. Open-Source Security Awareness Training Tools

Open-source tools are usually much more limited in capability and require significant investment from internal employees to get them off the ground.

These tools are entirely self-managed. You need to operate the infrastructure, onboard the training material, and potentially integrate multiple open-source solutions to offer an end-to-end training capability.

While open-source tools have no immediate cost, you need to factor in the time it takes to stand them up and maintain them and whether your business has the necessary expertise to use them effectively for training your employees.

Now that we understand the types of tools, platforms, and providers available, let's understand how the size of your business may impact the cost of security awareness training.

How Does the Size Of Your Business Impact Pricing?

Regardless of the type of provider you're using, there are sunk costs associated with acquiring and setting up the necessary infrastructure for each customer. As a result, you'll typically find that the cost per employee associated with running security awareness training becomes progressively lower as you scale through certain employee thresholds.

Each provider has different thresholds, but to give you an example, at CanIPhish, we provide the following discounting based on the size of a business:

1. 20% discount for businesses with 100 or more employees
2. 30% discount for businesses with 500 or more employees
3. 40% discount for businesses with 1,500 or more employees

Next, let's understand how your commitment impacts the price per employee.

How Does The Commitment You Make Impact Pricing?

As mentioned, providers have upfront acquisition and infrastructure costs to onboard customers. Because of this, almost every security awareness training provider will force customers to make an annual or multi-year subscription-based commitment. From market research, the team at CanIPhish found that you can expect the following discounts depending on the commitment you make:

1. Monthly subscription: Typically, no additional discounting is applied, and very few providers offer subscriptions that only have a monthly commitment.
2. Annual subscription: If a provider offers monthly subscriptions, you can typically expect a 20-40% discount for annual subscriptions. For example, CanIPhish provides a 40% discount on monthly pricing for annual commitments. If monthly subscriptions aren't on offer, then no additional discounts will apply.
3. Multi-year subscription: Typically, multi-year subscriptions are stacked based on the years you commit. The discounts can be 5-10% for every year of commitment. For example, with a 3-year commitment, you could expect an additional 15% discount from what the annual subscription purchase would be.

Example Pricing Scenarios

Now that we understand all the factors that determine how security awareness training is priced, let's look through a couple of real-world pricing scenarios.

#1 Example Pricing Scenario - 1,500 Employees Trained Every Month

Because you want to run training once a month, you should purchase an annual 1,500-employee subscription. With this, you can expect to pay:

Modern Training Provider Pricing

USD$1.25 base price x 40% annual discount x 40% volumetric discount = USD$0.45 a month per employee.
Total annualized cost: USD$8,100

Legacy Training Provider Pricing

USD$3.00 base price x 40% volumetric discount = USD$1.80 monthly per employee.
Total annualized cost: USD$32,400

Niche Training Provider Pricing

USD$4.00 base price x 40% volumetric discount = USD$2.80 monthly per employee.
Total annualized cost: USD$43,200

#2 Example Pricing Scenario - 250 Employees Trained Once A Year

Because you want to run training once a year, you should purchase a monthly 250-employee subscription where available. With this, you can expect to pay:

Modern Training Provider Pricing

USD$1.25 base price x 20% volumetric discount = USD$1.00 monthly per employee.
Total annualized cost: USD$250 (Monthly commitment available)

Legacy Training Provider Pricing

USD$3.00 base price x 20% volumetric discount = USD$2.40 a month per employee.
Total annualized cost: USD$7,200 (Monthly commitment not available)

Niche Training Provider Pricing

USD$4.00 base price x 20% volumetric discount = USD$3.20 a month per employee.
Total annualized cost: USD$9,600 (Monthly commitment not available)

Note: These examples are for demonstration purposes only. Every provider offers different pricing, which may differ based on industry, geographic location, or currency used for the transaction.

Conclusion

We hope you learned a lot about how various factors determine how much security awareness training costs. As some final tips, we additionally recommend considering the following criteria before deciding on your preferred provider:

1. Do you have staff who speak various languages? Ensure the provider you choose can support multi-lingual training. The translation process should be seamless and auto-translate based on browser settings or allow for manual configuration.
2. Ensure your provider meets your compliance and privacy needs. There are hundreds of providers and platforms out there. While it's tedious, read through their terms and conditions or privacy policy to understand how they handle your data, where it's located, and whether it will be shared with third parties such as insurance brokers.
3. Evaluate before you purchase. It can be difficult to understand the benefits and capabilities a provider can offer you without evaluating their solution. Ensure that any providers you're considering offer a free evaluation, ideally without time pressures.
4. Use simulated phishing to help direct training activities. Simulated phishing attacks are a fantastic tool to help lead training to those most in need of it. Many providers of security awareness training offer phishing as part of their package. Ensure that the phishing capabilities provided are realistic and in-depth. Every phishing attack should entice employees to perform a secondary action, such as downloading an attachment, clicking a link, or simply responding to the message.
5. Use automation to reduce operational overheads. The idea of manually setting up security awareness training campaigns every month is enough to deter people from the activity itself. Many platforms offer automation capabilities that can cycle through various training materials every week, month, or quarter to reduce the need for you to do it manually.

If you've looked around our website, you've likely already noticed that the team at CanIPhish provides a simulated phishing and security awareness training platform that ticks many of the boxes we've talked about in this article. If you want to evaluate our platform, create a free account and get started!

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Justify The Expense Of Security Awareness Training?

Justifying the expense of security awareness training should be approached by emphasizing the cost-effectiveness of proactive cyber security protections.

To do this, you can either look at the average cost and frequency of a cyber breach or perform a quantitative risk analysis specific to your own company. You can then look to see what it’ll cost to implement a security awareness training program and whether the risk reduction it provides outweighs the potential cost of a cyber breach.

What Are The Risks Of Not Implementing Security Awareness Training?

Not implementing security awareness training can have far-reaching consequences.

First, your employees will likely be more susceptible to social engineering attacks such as phishing. Second, your business may fail to meet regulatory obligations and be susceptible to fines by industry regulators or other legal penalties. Third, your company may fail to comply with cyber security frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO27001, etc. Finally, your company may incur increased premiums if utilizing cyber security insurance services.