Sell a UX Audit Online: Price & Deliver It Async

A UX audit is a paid, asynchronous review of a follower's whole product — information architecture, flows, heuristics, and accessibility — delivered as written notes or a recorded walkthrough. On Brillay, a designer prices it as a custom request, so the follower pays upfront and gets the audit back within a set turnaround, with no discovery call required. Custom Work lets you offer clearly scoped commissions and services: you set the price, the scope and the delivery time, and followers submit a brief and pay before you start.

No monthly fee, you only pay a small platform fee when you get paid. 8% platform fee when a follower pays for work, 5% platform fee on tips and goals. Card processing is separate. pricing

A common ask lands as: "Can you just look at the whole app and tell me what's wrong?" That request is bigger than a single wireframe or one landing page — it's a full-product review, and it deserves a full-product price rather than a quick reply typed between other work.

The Nielsen Norman Group has organized usability inspection around ten specific heuristics — visibility of system status, user control and freedom, and eight more — since Jakob Nielsen first published the set in 1994. A comprehensive audit works through a defined checklist like that, not a general "does this feel right" pass.

What counts as a full UX audit versus a quick review?

A full UX audit is a structured pass through a shipped product's information architecture, core flows, interface heuristics, and accessibility — not a reaction to one screen. A quick review, by contrast, answers one narrow question ("does this button placement make sense?") without evaluating the whole product end to end.

The difference between a full audit and a quick review matters for both pricing and scope. A narrow usability gut-check on a single flow fits a custom request scoped to that one task, or even a Paid Question answered in writing if it's a single yes/no judgment call. A comprehensive audit — IA, primary flows, heuristic violations, and accessibility together — is a materially larger deliverable and should be priced and scoped as its own tier, distinct from either. A custom request applies the audit to one follower’s own product or single flow, so the findings are theirs—not a generic report every buyer receives.

Early-stage work is a separate case again: reviewing wireframes or low-fidelity flows before anything ships is its own offer, since the product doesn't exist yet to audit end to end. A product that needs a hardening pass rather than a usability pass is a different offer too — see how to scope and sell a security audit for that adjacent format.

What should a comprehensive UX audit actually check?

A comprehensive audit should cover information architecture, the primary user flows, a heuristic evaluation against a named framework, and a defined accessibility pass — stated up front so the follower knows exactly what's being reviewed. Writing that checklist into the listing is practitioner guidance, not a measured finding, but it is the cheapest way to stop unpaid scope drift.

A workable structure:

• Information architecture: navigation, labeling, and whether the structure matches how users actually think about the product.
• Core flows: the two or three tasks that matter most (signup, checkout, first-use), walked end to end.
• Heuristic evaluation: issues mapped against a named framework such as Nielsen's ten usability heuristics, so findings are traceable rather than just opinion.
• Accessibility: a pass against a stated standard, most commonly WCAG. The W3C published WCAG 2.2 as a W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023 and added 9 success criteria beyond WCAG 2.1 — specify the conformance level (A, AA, or AAA) you're checking against.

An accessibility pass reliably produces findings: WebAIM's 2026 Million report detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of the top one million home pages, up from 94.8% in its 2025 report. A designer selling a WCAG spot-check can quote that WebAIM figure to a buyer who assumes their product is already fine.

State the checklist in the listing itself. A buyer who sees "IA + 3 core flows + 10-heuristic pass + WCAG 2.2 AA spot-check" knows exactly what they're paying for before they submit anything.

How much should a UX audit cost?

Price a UX audit from your own estimated hours rather than a published market rate: multiply the hours the defined scope takes by an hourly rate you can defend. A comprehensive audit covering architecture, several flows, a heuristic pass, and accessibility takes materially longer than a single-screen critique, so it should cost proportionally more — the same hours-times-rate math is how you'd price a cloud cost audit for an entirely different kind of technical review.

The formula is estimated hours × your hourly rate = list price. For an anchor on the hourly side, the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook reports a median annual wage of $104,000 for web and digital interface designers as of May 2025 — roughly $50 an hour across a 2,080-hour work year. Independent designers generally set a rate above that employed-equivalent figure because they carry costs an employer would absorb: the IRS puts the US self-employment tax rate at 15.3%, made up of 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare.

Every price in that table is illustrative arithmetic — estimated hours multiplied by roughly the $50/hour BLS-derived anchor, then rounded — not an observed market rate, a guarantee of demand, or income you should expect. Actual pricing depends on your audience, positioning, and the specificity of what you deliver.

Check the net before publishing a number. On a $250 audit, Brillay's 8% platform fee on paid work is $20.00 (tips and goals carry 5%) and typical US online-card processing of 2.9% + $0.30 comes to $7.55, leaving about $222 (Brillay pricing; Stripe pricing). Map the top two rows to a mid-tier and top-tier custom request and keep the one-hour check as either a cheap service or a Paid Question answered in writing.

Where do you sell a UX audit without a marketplace listing?

You can sell a UX audit directly from the link already in your bio, without listing on a freelance marketplace or building a booking flow. Followers pay upfront, and you deliver on your own schedule. how it works

Marketplace listings add friction the audit itself doesn't need: a profile to build, reviews to accumulate, a fee structure you don't control. A direct link skips the discovery layer — someone already following your design work goes straight from "can you look at this" to a priced, defined offer. The same async pattern works for reviewing someone's automations instead of their interface, as in selling an AI workflow audit.

Brillay's own fee is the single rate already stated above — nothing further to calculate. Stripe describes 2.9% + $0.30 as typical US domestic online-card pricing rather than a fixed universal rate, with international cards and currency conversion priced higher.

What should a UX audit deliverable actually include?

The deliverable should match the listing: findings organized by the checklist categories (IA, flows, heuristics, accessibility), prioritized by severity, with concrete recommendations rather than just a list of complaints. A recorded walkthrough can supplement written notes but shouldn't replace them, since the follower needs something to reference and act on later.

Brillay's Custom Work documentation is specific about the delivery envelope: the follower can attach their own files when they order, and the creator delivers a written note plus up to 5 files — video, audio, images, PDF, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, with video and audio up to 20 minutes — and/or a private link (Google Drive, Loom, Dropbox) for anything larger. A 40-page audit PDF plus a 15-minute recorded walkthrough therefore fits inside a single delivery.

Delivery time is creator-set, up to 5 days, for Custom Work or a Personalized Video. If a submission is materially bigger than what was scoped — a multi-product suite submitted against a single-app audit tier, for example — decline it rather than absorbing the extra work unpaid.

How many users or evaluators does it take to find usability problems?

Two separate Nielsen Norman Group findings apply, and they measure different methods: five participants in a usability test surfaced about 85% of a product's usability problems, while a single expert running a heuristic evaluation found only about 35%. Participant testing and expert review are not interchangeable, so an audit sold as expert review should be described as expert review.

The Nielsen Norman Group's research found that testing with five participants in a single study surfaced roughly 85% of a product's usability problems, with additional participants showing diminishing returns after that point (Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users).

"After the first study with five participants has found 85% of the usability problems, you will want to fix these problems in a redesign." — Nielsen Norman Group, "Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users"

Expert heuristic evaluation — the method behind a paid async audit — has its own, lower coverage number. Jakob Nielsen reported that across six of his projects, single evaluators found only 35 percent of the usability problems in the interfaces (The Theory Behind Heuristic Evaluations).

"Averaged over six of my projects, single evaluators found only 35 percent of the usability problems in the interfaces." — Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, "The Theory Behind Heuristic Evaluations"

In the same article Nielsen writes that his recommendation "is normally to use three to five evaluators since one does not gain that much additional information by using larger numbers."

Set expectations in the listing accordingly: a solo heuristic audit is a fast, structured way to surface a substantial set of issues cheaply, but Nielsen's own 35% figure means one reviewer does not find everything, and an audit does not replace testing with real users.

What else can you offer alongside a UX audit?

Offer smaller paid formats beside the full audit for buyers who need less: a single text answer, a recorded reaction to a shipped project, a goal for your own research, or a plain tip. Each of those is a separate Brillay offer with its own price and rules, which keeps the audit listing itself a single, clearly scoped deliverable.

• Paid Question: a single, narrow usability gut-check answered in writing, for someone who just needs a quick judgment call rather than a full report.
• Goals: funding toward your own portfolio-grade case study or research project — a follower-funded goal, not a paid review of someone else's product.
• Personalized Video: a recorded reaction shouting out a follower's shipped project, distinct from a written critique.
• Tips: a way for someone who found your free design commentary useful to support you without buying a defined deliverable.

Keep the audit listing focused on the full-product review. Bundling unrelated formats into one unscoped package is exactly the ambiguity a defined checklist is supposed to prevent.

How do you launch a UX audit offer today?

Launching a UX audit offer takes four decisions: define the checklist (IA, flows, heuristics, accessibility), set the price from estimated hours rather than a competitor's rate, pick a delivery time inside Brillay's 120-hour service cap, and write down what is excluded — a full redesign, ongoing consulting, a second round of testing. Then publish the listing.

Custom Work is available with nothing to apply for and no approval step. For context on how the discipline is valued, the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook reports a median annual wage of $104,000 for web and digital interface designers as of May 2025 — background for setting an hourly anchor, not a pricing benchmark for any one audit.

Related reading: how to write a custom request offer covers scoping a listing so a request stays within what the buyer actually purchased, and sell a Figma file teardown covers the narrower, file-specific version of this same async-critique format — auditing a Bubble app walks through the equivalent offer for builders on that no-code platform.

Frequently asked questions

Short answers to what designers ask before listing a paid UX audit: how an audit differs from a usability review, whether a certification is required, how many problems a single-expert heuristic pass actually catches, what to do when a request exceeds the scope you sold, and what selling through Brillay costs.

What's the difference between a UX audit and a usability review?

A UX audit is comprehensive — information architecture, multiple core flows, a heuristic pass, and accessibility, evaluated together against a stated framework. A usability review is narrower and faster: a task-based check of whether a new user can complete one or two key actions, without necessarily covering the whole product.

Do I need a certification to sell UX audits?

There is nothing to apply for and no approval step to set up Custom Work or Paid Questions. Represent your experience accurately, and check any local professional or advertising rules that apply to how you describe the service.

How many usability problems will a single-expert heuristic audit actually catch?

Jakob Nielsen reported that, averaged over six of his projects, single evaluators found only 35 percent of the usability problems in the interfaces, and he recommends three to five evaluators for fuller coverage (Theory Behind Heuristic Evaluations). The separate 85% figure from the Nielsen Norman Group applies to usability testing with five real participants, not to expert heuristic review (Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users), so don't quote it as coverage for a solo audit.

What if the product is bigger than what I scoped the audit for?

Decline a request that's materially outside the listed scope, or point the follower to a larger tier before starting. Stating the checklist and product boundary in the listing (for example, "one app, up to 3 core flows") prevents that ambiguity upfront.

What does Brillay charge?

The platform-fee line for Custom Work is set out earlier on this page, worked through against a $250 audit example. Stripe's card processing is billed separately from that, typically 2.9% + $0.30 for US cards.

Create your free Brillay page and turn the next "can you look at my whole app?" request into a clearly scoped, paid UX audit.