Kubernetes penetration testing services: prices and scope compared

By The PenTest Index · Offers and cloud rules checked October 10, 2026

Kubernetes penetration testing services test how far an attacker gets inside your cluster from one compromised pod. Three providers publish starting prices: Invadel from $6,800 for one cluster, Appsecco from $7,500 with cloud and IAM, and SafetyBis from €3,000. They cover different scopes, and some offers sold under this name are read-only configuration reviews, so check what a quote includes.

The short version: first find out whether the person asking wants your product tested or your cluster tested. If it's the cluster, buy a test that starts from a compromised pod, includes a configuration review, names each cluster in writing, and states the retest deadline. We read the public pages of nine offers to build the comparison below. We did not buy or run any of them.

Looking for how to test a cluster yourself? See how a penetration test is done. This page is about buying one.

Which Kubernetes penetration testing services do you actually need?

There are four, and they are often sold under the same name. Each one answers a different question, so the right pick depends on what you were asked to prove.

A few terms, once. A pod is the small unit Kubernetes runs your containers in. RBAC (role-based access control) is the set of rules for who and what can do which actions in the cluster. A service account is the identity a pod uses when it talks to the cluster.

Think of a configuration review as a home inspection: someone walks the house with a checklist. A penetration test is someone actually trying the doors and windows to see which ones open. Both are useful. Only one shows you what gets in.

The providers draw the same line. OffSeq sells a configuration and RBAC review as its Essential package and attack-path testing as a separate, larger one. Invadel says a benchmark scan "cannot prove exploitation" and that the chaining takes a tester working by hand.

If the request turns out to be about your product, a cluster test is the wrong purchase. See web application penetration testing services or our SaaS penetration testing page, where we compare priced offers.

Kubernetes penetration testing companies and what they publish

Three of the offers we read publish a commercial starting price; three more describe the work but require a quote. Everything below is what each provider says on its own public page, checked October 10, 2026. It is not an assessment of testing quality. Providers are listed A to Z within each group, and nothing here is ranked.

Offers with a published starting price

Offers that need a quote

Two other routes. Horizon3.ai sells NodeZero Kubernetes Pentest, an autonomous product you deploy inside the cluster rather than a team you hire. We found no published price for it. And two UK firms have G-Cloud 14 listings on the UK Digital Marketplace: Pen Test Partners at £1,200 per day and ControlPlane at £750 to £2,700 per day on the listing (its attached rate card also shows £2,850 for a level-7 strategy/architecture role). G-Cloud 15 replaced G-Cloud 14 in August 2026, so those are historical framework rates, not current prices or commercial totals. More on that in the cost section.

Which offers deserve a closer look?

Ready to talk to a provider? Go straight to its page.

See Appsecco's cloud and Kubernetes testing

See Invadel's one-cluster offer

See SafetyBis's tiers

See SecureLayer7's Kubernetes testing

See 4ARMED's Kubernetes testing

See OffSeq's packages

We have no paid relationship with any provider on this page. Read how we check offers.

How much does a Kubernetes pentest cost?

The published starting prices we found are $6,800 for one cluster (Invadel), $7,500 for cloud, Kubernetes and IAM together (Appsecco), and €3,000 for a single-cluster Essential test (SafetyBis). These are advertised starting points for three different scopes. They are not quotes, and they are not a market average.

Three things to keep straight when you read them:

A starting price is for the smallest version. Invadel's $6,800 is one cluster. Add clusters or a deep test of the cloud account and it is quoted from your scope. SafetyBis's €3,000 does not include the cloud pivot; its tier that does starts at €11,000.

A different bundle is a different product. Appsecco's $7,500 covers cloud and IAM along with Kubernetes. That may be exactly what you want, or more than you asked for. It is not $700 more expensive than Invadel for the same job.

A day rate is not a price. The two older UK G-Cloud 14 listings give service-day or consultant-day rates. The total depends on the quoted days at each applicable rate, plus taxes and extras. For illustration only: 5 days at £1,200 would be £6,000 before VAT. No provider quoted five days; we are showing the arithmetic. If a quote is built on days, ask: "How many tester-days is this, at what rate, and is the retest inside that number?"

What moves a quote, according to the providers' own pages: the number of clusters, whether they are managed or self-managed, how many namespaces and workloads are involved, whether the surrounding cloud account and image registry are in scope, and whether you need a compliance letter.

What "free retest" leaves out. Four of these providers say a retest is included. Only Appsecco states a window: 30 days from report delivery. For illustration, a report delivered June 1 would put that deadline at July 1. The page does not say whether you must request the retest or finish it by then, so ask. For the others, ask how many rounds, which findings qualify, and the last date you can request one.

Already holding a quote? Run it through our Quote Check. For wider price evidence, see penetration testing cost.

What should a Kubernetes pentest scope include?

Name each cluster, the starting point, and whether the cloud account around it is in or out. Those three lines change the price more than anything else, and they are where two quotes for "a Kubernetes pentest" quietly stop being the same job.

A scope brief asks every provider the same question so the answers line up. Copy this one, fill in what you know, and write "unknown" where you don't. An unknown is not a "no" and not "covered." It is a question to settle.

Kubernetes penetration test: buyer's scope brief

1. Why now and who reads the report: customer, auditor, insurer or internal team, and what exactly they asked for
2. Who can authorize testing: the system owner who will sign, and which cloud provider's rules apply
3. Platform and environments: EKS, AKS, GKE or self-managed; number of clusters; production, staging, and how closely staging matches
4. Inside the cluster: namespaces, sensitive workloads by type, tenant boundaries
5. Outside-in entry points: ingress, exposed APIs and management endpoints, by category
6. Starting point: outside only, a low-privilege pod, or a low-privilege user account
7. Paths to test: RBAC and service accounts, movement between namespaces, pod to node, network policy, secrets
8. Cloud boundary: which of your cloud accounts and workload identities are included, excluded, or waiting on provider sign-off
9. Related work: app and API, image registry, build pipeline, custom operators. Mark each included, excluded or quoted separately.
10. Safety rules: allowed dates and hours, rate limits, forbidden actions, stop conditions, emergency contact
11. Deliverables: executive and technical report, evidence for each finding, fixes, a walkthrough call, any letter the recipient needs
12. Retest: which findings, how many rounds, the last date to request, any extra fee, and whether the report is updated
13. Price: currency, fixed or day-based, what is excluded, taxes, payment schedule
14. Dates: scope sign-off, test start, test end, final report, retest, your deadline
15. Open questions: anything still unknown, and who will answer it

Send the same completed brief to each provider and ask them to mark every line included, excluded or quoted separately.

This brief is a buying aid. It is not permission to test. Testing needs written authorization from the system owner that names the actual targets and activities, plus agreed rules of engagement. Do not put passwords, tokens, kubeconfig files or internal addresses in it.

A filled example, entirely made up. One EKS production cluster with 12 namespaces. A customer-facing API behind ingress. A staging cluster that is not assumed to match production. Starting point: one low-privilege application pod. Paths to test: RBAC, namespace isolation, network policy, and the workload's own AWS roles. Excluded: AWS-managed EKS internals. App and API logic: quoted separately. Report with evidence for each finding, and a retest before a customer deadline six weeks out.

How do you scope it when pod IPs keep changing?

Scope by the things that stay put: clusters, namespaces, service accounts, ingress points and the agreed starting position. A list of pod IP addresses can go out of date before the test starts, because Kubernetes may replace pods. The tester still needs clear boundaries and written authorization for the targets, just described by ownership instead of by address.

If filling in the brief showed you that you don't know who needs the report or which layer they meant, settle that before you ask anyone for a price. Find My PenTest Match walks through those questions and gives you a checklist of what to ask the person who requested the test. It's free, needs no email, and sends nothing to providers. It doesn't list Kubernetes providers yet; the comparison above is where to find those.

Find My PenTest Match

Can you pentest EKS, AKS or GKE without asking the cloud provider?

You can test resources you own on all three, inside each provider's published rules. AWS and Microsoft prohibit denial-of-service testing under their standard penetration-testing rules; Google's FAQ instead points to its Acceptable Use Policy, terms and the requirement that tests affect only your own projects. The rules differ, and Amazon's has a wrinkle worth knowing about.

We are not saying EKS testing is prohibited. On EKS, some workloads run on EC2 worker nodes, while others use Fargate or EKS Auto Mode with different infrastructure responsibilities; AWS runs the control plane. What we are saying is that "EKS supported" on a sales page does not settle which parts are yours to test. Invadel's page makes the same point: it says EKS is not among AWS's pre-approved services, so it keeps testing to the customer's own workloads and cluster resources and confirms the current policy during scoping. That is a good answer to hear from any provider.

The question to send: "Which parts of our EKS setup will you touch, how do they map to AWS's permitted services list, and who contacts AWS if anything falls outside it?"

Is it safe to pentest a production cluster?

A read-only configuration review is low risk. Active testing, such as trying to break out of a container or move between namespaces, carries real risk, so most providers prefer a staging cluster that closely matches production.

The providers say so themselves. OffSeq calls configuration and RBAC review "normally read-only and low impact" and says active attack-path testing is "explicitly scoped, scheduled and subject to stop conditions," with a non-production cluster preferred. Invadel says it tests in a non-production or staging cluster where one exists and does no denial-of-service testing. SafetyBis says it prefers staging "for anything risky."

Two cautions. First, staging only helps if its permissions and network rules match production. A test of a cluster that is set up differently tells you about that cluster. Second, some providers answer "will it disrupt us?" with a flat "no." Treat that as a goal, not a guarantee, and get the stop conditions, allowed hours and emergency contact in writing before work starts.

kube-bench, a CIS scan or a penetration test: what's the difference?

A benchmark scan checks your settings against a list. A penetration test shows what an attacker can do by chaining those settings together.

Say a scan reports that one pod runs in privileged mode. That is a setting. A tester goes further: gets out of that pod onto the node, picks up a service account token there, and uses it to read secrets in another namespace. Now you know which single fix breaks the chain.

SafetyBis puts it this way on its own page: tools like kube-bench and Trivy "find the ingredients," and the tester chains them into the one attack that matters. A scan is still worth running. It is fast and it gives your team a baseline. It just isn't what most people mean when they ask for a pentest. For the wider distinction, see penetration testing vs vulnerability scanning.

Do you need a Kubernetes pentest if you already tested the app?

Not always. If the person who asked is satisfied by your app test, you're done. But an app test usually says nothing about what a compromised pod can reach in the cluster or in your cloud account, so check what your last test actually covered before you assume either way.

Pull out the last statement of work and report, and answer four questions:

• Did it test the app and API? If yes, check which app and API features its scope and report actually covered.
• Did it start from inside a pod and test RBAC, namespaces or nodes? If no, that inside-cluster attack-path coverage is not established.
• Did it test the cloud identities your workloads use? If no, the cluster-to-cloud path was not tested.
• Is it recent enough, and in the form the reader wants? Only they can say.

Then show the scope to whoever asked and ask: "Does this cover what you need, or do you need the cluster itself tested?" If they accept it, buy nothing. If a layer is missing, buy only that layer.

Does SOC 2 or PCI DSS require a Kubernetes penetration test?

Your auditor or assessor decides what they need, and it depends on whether the cluster is part of the system they are assessing. We did not read the standards for this page, so we are not going to tell you what they require here.

What we can say: providers advertise that their Kubernetes reports "support" SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS work. That is a provider's claim about its report. It is not your auditor's acceptance. Before you book, ask the person who will read the report which systems the test must cover, whether automated testing alone is acceptable, and what the report has to contain. Our SOC 2 penetration testing and PCI penetration testing pages cover those requests in detail.

A worked example: one EKS cluster, one customer request

Here is how the comparison turns into a decision. The buyer is made up. No provider quoted for this.

Say you run a 30-person SaaS company in the US on one EKS cluster with a staging copy. A large customer's security questionnaire asks for an infrastructure penetration test. You want to know what happens if one application pod is taken over, including whether it can reach your AWS account. Your team needs about 45 days to fix findings before a retest.

Your conditions:

• Must have: testing that starts from a compromised pod
• Must have: the pod-to-AWS-account path tested
• Must have: a manual retest you can request 45 days after the report
• Must have: a plan that respects AWS's testing policy
• Would like: a fixed price in US dollars

This is our Purchase Check: one condition, one offer, what the published terms establish, and what to ask next. "Supported" means the public page supports that one condition. It is not a verdict on the provider.

Where that leaves this buyer. Send the same brief to Invadel and Appsecco first. Both publish a US-dollar starting price and both describe testing from a pod. The open items that decide it are Invadel's total once the AWS account is included, its day-45 retest terms and the approved AWS testing boundaries; and whether Appsecco will test the exact pod-to-AWS path and extend its retest window to day 45. Add SecureLayer7 as a third quote if you want another manual tester in the mix; you will need its price and its retest deadline. Leave out OffSeq Essential and SafetyBis Essential, because neither covers a must-have as published.

If your conditions differ, the answer changes. Drop the AWS-path requirement and SafetyBis Essential comes back in at the lowest published entry price. Need only a baseline? OffSeq Essential fits and the others are more than you need.

A few remaining questions

How long does a Kubernetes penetration test take?

The stated testing times we found: SafetyBis lists 4–6 working days for a single cluster and 10–18 for a multi-cluster test with a cloud pivot, plus the report. Appsecco lists a 5–10 business day window for cloud and Kubernetes work. Those are provider estimates of testing time, not booked dates. If you have a deadline, ask for the final report date in writing and leave room for fixes and the retest.

Do testers need cluster-admin access?

Not necessarily for a compromised-pod attack-path test. Invadel says the useful starting point is what an attacker would have: code running in one pod or a low-privilege service account token. SafetyBis asks for the same kind of minimal foothold. A configuration review is different and usually needs a read-only role. Agree the access level in writing either way.

Is a Kubernetes pentest the same as a cloud pentest?

No, though they meet in the middle. A cloud test goes after the account: identities, storage, network. A Kubernetes test goes after the cluster running in that account, then looks at the bridge back into it. Invadel and SafetyBis both say they often scope the two together for that reason, and Appsecco sells them as one offer. If you only buy one, be clear which side of the bridge is included.

Sources

Provider details are what each company publishes about itself. We have not purchased these services or tested their quality. Prices are advertised starting points, not quotes.

Spotted a change to an offer? Tell us how to correct it.