Buyer Guide · Total Cost of Ownership

What Does DDoS Protection
Really Cost?

The invoice is only one part of DDoS TCO. A realistic comparison includes software, hardware, transit, cloud transfer, support, operations, redundancy and the cost of maintaining enough capacity to survive an attack.

Three Economic Models

Different architectures create
different cost structures.

Cloud Scrubbing

You pay for access to distributed mitigation networks, capacity, security operations and clean traffic delivery.

Public-Cloud Integrated

Protection is part of the cloud ecosystem. AWS Shield Standard is included for supported resources; Shield Advanced has a separate subscription and usage model.

Inline Protection

You provide servers and upstream capacity; the product provides local mitigation and policy enforcement.

Published NeuroWall Pricing

The software component is
easy to model.

$99
Business / node / month
$299
Enterprise / node / month
$499
Gateway / node / month

Community is free for evaluation. DDoS protection is included in Business and Enterprise and is an add-on for Gateway. NeuroWall does not add a per-GB, per-packet or per-attack software charge.

Example Math

What per-node pricing looks like
over three years.

DeploymentMonthlyAnnual3 Years
10 Business nodes$990$11,880$35,640
25 Business nodes$2,475$29,700$89,100
100 Business nodes$9,900$118,800$356,400
10 Enterprise nodes$2,990$35,880$107,640

Software subscription only. Infrastructure, transit, staff, optional add-ons and volume discounts are separate.

Public Benchmark

AWS Shield Advanced provides
a useful reference point.

AWS publicly lists Shield Advanced at $3,000 per organization per month, plus applicable data-transfer usage charges, with a one-year commitment.

$36K
Base subscription / year
$108K
Base subscription / 3 years
+ usage
Applicable Shield data-transfer charges
Important Correction

A larger attack does not automatically mean
every cloud provider sends a larger bill.

Cloudflare Magic Transit, for example, measures clean bandwidth and excludes blocked DDoS traffic from that measurement. Akamai, Radware and Imperva generally require commercial quotes for comparable enterprise deployments.

The credible TCO question is not "Who charges for every attack packet?" It is "What capacity, operations and infrastructure are included in the price?"
The Hidden Cost

Bandwidth can dominate
DDoS economics.

A 10 Gbps firewall cannot rescue a 10 Gbps circuit from a 100 Gbps attack.

Inline protection can only filter traffic that reaches it. If the upstream link is saturated first, you need upstream mitigation or more network capacity. That capacity belongs in the TCO model.

TCO Checklist

Model the whole
operating environment.

License

Annual subscription and committed contract value.

Compute

Appliances, servers, VMs, NICs and redundancy.

Network

Transit, clean delivery, cross-connects and cloud transfer.

Operations

Who handles the attack at 3 a.m.?

Capacity

How large an attack can the environment survive?

Lifecycle

Refreshes, upgrades, support and professional services.

Get started

Predictable software cost.
Honest capacity math.

NeuroWall's per-node software price is predictable, but local protection does not remove transit, compute or upstream-capacity costs.