WAVE Pro Pricing in 2026: Full Cost Breakdown

WAVE Pricing Tiers

Hidden Costs You Won't See on the Pricing Page

• ⚠ Page credit model — costs scale with page count, not sites; large sites get expensive fast
• ⚠ No code fix generation at any pricing tier — you still need developer time to figure out every fix
• ⚠ No compliance reports or VPAT documentation included
• ⚠ API requires your own integration work — not a turn-key solution for site-wide compliance
• ⚠ Detection is limited to what WAVE's engine catches — some dynamic content and complex ARIA patterns may be missed

WAVE’s Pricing: Free Until You Need Scale

WAVE’s free browser extension is genuinely valuable. Open it on any page and it shows you a visual overlay of accessibility violations with detailed WCAG references. There’s no sign-up, no credit card, and the detection quality is trusted by accessibility professionals. For spot-checking individual pages during development, it’s the right tool.

The free model hits its ceiling fast.

Where Free Stops Working

Scanning one page at a time is fine for spot checks. It doesn’t work for:

• Auditing a 50-page site before a product launch
• Running automated scans in CI/CD pipelines
• Generating consolidated reports across multiple client sites
• Scheduling regular compliance monitoring on a recurring basis

For any of these, you need the WAVE API.

WAVE API Pricing

The WAVE API starts at $100+/month based on page credits. Each page scan consumes a credit. A 100-page site scanned once per month consumes 100 credits. Scan weekly and that’s 400 credits per month. For large sites or high-frequency scanning, credit consumption rises quickly.

This is a meaningful cost jump from free, and it comes with the same core limitation: the API returns violation data only. No code fixes. No compliance reports. You get the detection, but everything downstream — figuring out the fix, implementing it, documenting it — is still on your team.

The Missing Piece at Every Tier

At the free extension, at the $100+/month API, at high-volume custom pricing: WAVE does not generate code fixes. It tells you what’s wrong. Your developers determine what to change and write the fix.

For a developer with accessibility expertise, interpreting WAVE output is straightforward. For teams without that expertise, each violation report requires research: what WCAG criterion was violated, what the correct attribute or pattern is, what the fix looks like in their specific framework.

A11yProof’s output includes the code fix alongside the violation data. The developer reviews the suggested change, applies it, and the issue is resolved — no separate research step.

Cost Comparison for a 5-Site Agency

For developers comfortable building a custom WAVE API integration and handling fix research manually, the WAVE API is a capable scanning engine. For teams that want scanning, fix generation, and compliance reports in one self-serve tool, A11yProof covers the full workflow at lower cost.