Security vendors and AI agent operators are living in different worlds, and nowhere is that gap more obvious than in the pricing sheet. We sat down this week and actually worked out what dependency scanning costs us per month under the two models we've used: Snyk Team (per-developer seat) and Aegis402 (per-call, pay-as-you-scan). The math is uncomfortable for one of them.
ChargeShield is an AI-agent shop. We operate 3 autonomous agents in production: one that drafts chargeback rebuttals, one that classifies incoming dispute evidence, and one that talks to Stripe's dispute API to submit responses. Each of these agents installs a different slice of the Python and Node ecosystem on a per-run basis — PDF parsers, image classifiers, crypto libraries for Stripe's signatures, JSON schema validators. A typical run touches somewhere between 15 and 30 dependencies. We process roughly 600 agent runs per day combined, spread across those three agents.
That's the volume. Now the two pricing models.
Snyk Team's public list pricing starts at $25/developer/month for the entry tier, and in practice most real deployments end up in the $52–98/developer/month range once you're on a bundle that includes Snyk Code, Snyk Open Source, and integrations. Let's take a mid-point: $75/developer/month.
Here's the problem. Snyk's pricing unit is "developer". Our pricing unit is "autonomous agent". An agent is not a developer. It doesn't open pull requests, it doesn't get a seat, it doesn't accept a EULA on a per-seat basis. So the question becomes: do we buy a Snyk seat for each human on our team (who isn't actually running the scans), or do we buy no seats and hope the security team's existing license covers the agent's installs?
Both answers are wrong. The humans aren't touching these packages — the agents are. The security team's license is scoped to code-you-commit, not code-an-agent-pip-installs-at-runtime. In practice, what happens is you buy the seats anyway, and then you never scan what actually matters.
Call it $75/month minimum per human on the team, fixed cost, regardless of agent volume.
Aegis402 charges $0.005 per dependency scanned, paid inline in USDC on Base via the x402 protocol. No subscription, no seat, no contract. Your agent hits the endpoint with a list of packages, gets a 402 Payment Required with a signed challenge on the first call, signs a micropayment from its own wallet, retries, and gets the scan result in the same round-trip.
Do the arithmetic on our actual volume:
| Line item | Value |
|---|---|
| Agent runs/day | 600 |
| Avg dependencies per run | ~20 |
| Dependencies scanned/day | 12,000 |
| Cost per dependency | $0.005 |
| Cost/day | $60 |
| Cost/month (30 days) | $1,800 |
Wait, that looks big. It is — because we picked an aggressive volume. Most shops running AI agents are not yet at 600 runs/day. Run the same calc at a more typical early-stage number:
| Scenario | Runs/day | Deps scanned/mo | Aegis402 bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby project | 5 | 3,000 | $15 |
| Early startup | 30 | 18,000 | $90 |
| Small team | 100 | 60,000 | $300 |
| ChargeShield (today) | 600 | 360,000 | $1,800 |
Here's what Snyk Team (at a 5-dev shop, $75/dev/mo = $375/mo) vs Aegis402 looks like across those same scenarios:
| Scenario | Snyk Team (5 devs) | Aegis402 | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby project | $375 | $15 | 25× |
| Early startup | $375 | $90 | 4.2× |
| Small team | $375 | $300 | 1.25× |
| ChargeShield | $375 | $1,800 | 0.21× (Snyk wins) |
Notice the crossover. At our current volume, Snyk would actually be cheaper if it were scanning the same surface — which it isn't, because Snyk doesn't scan an agent's runtime pip-install. That's the honest part of this post: per-call pricing is not universally cheaper. It's cheaper until the crossover point, which in our model lands somewhere around 150-200 agent runs per day. Below that, pay-per-call dominates by a factor of 4–75×. Above that, you start paying for the convenience of not needing a contract.
Pay-per-call pricing is a rational fit for: low-volume agent operators, weekend projects, hobby bots, early-stage startups, anyone scanning code that doesn't fit a "developer seat" abstraction. It starts losing to seat pricing once your agent volume looks like a full-time human's PR throughput.
Price per month is not the only dimension. The other one is who owns the scanner binary, and the Trivy compromise of March 19 reminded every AI-agent shop what that dimension is worth. We wrote that post already — the short version is that a stateless HTTP scanner has a dramatically smaller attack surface than a vendored binary one, and an attacker who wants to poison "all the scanners" has a much harder job if the scanner is an endpoint rather than an installed dependency.
For us, that's why we switched even though the per-call math is close-to-parity at our volume. We'd rather pay $1,800 for a scanner that can't host a credential-stealing payload than $375 for a scanner that just had one force-pushed to 75 version tags.
If you're running AI agents at any volume and you're not yet at "full-time human PR throughput" scale, Aegis402 will cost you less per month than any seat-based SCA tool. If you're at that scale, the price is a wash — but the threat model still favors the HTTP-service approach, and the absence of a monthly contract + the absence of a binary in your agent's PATH is structurally worth paying for.
Either way: scan the dependencies your agents install. The first post in this series explains why nobody else is doing it for you, and the Trivy post explains why the traditional answer stopped working.
Don't want to integrate an API? Get a one-shot Aegis Quick Audit — submit a GitHub repo, get a branded PDF report with every CVE + CISA KEV flag in your dependency tree. 9 CHF, delivered in 24h, no account.
Try the math on your own numbers. Start with the free evaluation track: curl -X POST https://aegis402.vmaxbadge.ch/trial returns a token good for 10 scans over 24h, no signup, no wallet — use it as X-Trial-Token on /scan. Once your agent is in production, drop the header and pay per-call via x402 on the same endpoint. MCP manifest at https://aegis402.vmaxbadge.ch/mcp.