Security and privacy decision
ADAWCAG
A technical user can build the automated scanning, evidence capture, reporting, and monitoring pieces in about a week, but cannot reproduce the certified human audits, federal procurement registrations, or the legal/contract assurances that form much of the product's enterprise value.
Visit website↗$149/mo
$1,788/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off40 h to build
$200/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Crawl a site, run axe/pa11y/Lighthouse on each page, capture timestamped screenshots, generate evidence-grade PDF/VPAT, notify and archive results.
What it still won’t have
- Quarterly or monthly human audits by DHS Trusted Tester–certified auditors
- Federal procurement support (SAM.gov registration, PO/invoice workflows)
- Legal-grade assurances and demand-letter response pack
- AT session recordings, dedicated compliance lead, and guaranteed SLAs
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
Real audits by DHS-certified testers — not a fake overlay widget.
- Brand trust
SAM.gov Registered · CAGE 1AUK4 · DHS Trusted Tester
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted accessibility scanning service using Node.js + Playwright + axe-core, Postgres, and AWS (Lambda or ECS) + S3 (or R2) for evidence. Core features in scope: 1) crawler (sitemap + link discovery) and scheduled full-site scans; 2) headless page runner that executes axe-core, pa11y, and Lighthouse per page and captures full-page and element-level screenshots; 3) store raw results and timestamped screenshots in S3 and metadata in Postgres; 4) PDF report generator that compiles findings and evidence and produces a VPAT/ACR template filled from results; 5) small web UI and API to trigger scans, view results, download PDF evidence, and send email alerts via an SMTP/SendGrid integration. Out of scope: offering certified human DHS Trusted Tester audits, legal opinions, procurement / SAM.gov registration, and HOTS-level continuous human monitoring. Include error handling for headless runs (retries, timeouts), input validation for target URLs, basic auth for the UI, and unit + integration tests for crawler, scanner integration, storage, and report generation.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score59
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productADAWCAG.org — official product
- official pricingADAWCAG.org — Pricing (Government)
- official docsADAWCAG.org — Docs
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
