AI Security Costs $500/User. Here's What $10/Month Actually Gets You.

I spent two weeks building a spreadsheet of every AI security product I could find. Pricing pages. Sales call recordings on YouTube. G2 reviews where buyers accidentally disclosed what they paid. Gartner reports behind $30K paywalls.

The result was a number that kept repeating: $200 to $536 per user, per year.

That's what Netskope, Zscaler, and Palo Alto charge to tell you what your developers are sending to AI tools. And that's before implementation, which averages 208 days for Netskope and requires routing every byte of your AI traffic through their cloud.

I built CitrusGlaze because I thought the pricing was broken. Not just expensive — fundamentally disconnected from what most teams actually need.

What $200-536/user/year buys you

Let me break down what enterprise AI security vendors charge and what you get at each tier. These numbers come from public pricing pages, G2 reviews, Gartner reports, and sales call data I've collected.

Netskope (Netskope One AI Security)

• Price range: $200-536/user/year for the full SASE platform; DLP add-on alone is $28-67/user/year
• Deployment time: Median 208 days from purchase to production
• What's included: Inline prompt/response inspection, DLP policies for AI traffic, shadow AI discovery via their AI Index, plus the Agentic Broker they launched March 11, 2026
• The catch: All your AI traffic routes through Netskope's cloud. Your prompts — including the source code, credentials, and internal data your developers paste into Claude or ChatGPT — pass through a third-party data center before reaching the AI provider.

For a 50-person engineering team, that's $10,000 to $26,800 per year. Minimum.

Zscaler (AI Guard / ZIA)

• Price range: $72-375/user/year; enterprise deals typically $25K-250K+/year
• Recent change: 35%+ price increases reported by customers on Gartner Peer Insights
• What's included: Deep packet inspection of AI prompts/responses via the Zero Trust Exchange, GenAI Security Report for shadow AI discovery
• The catch: Same as Netskope — cloud-routed. Also, no token/cost tracking. You can see what's leaking, but you can't see what it's costing you.

For a 50-person team at the mid-range: $9,375/year. After the price hike: $12,656/year.

Palo Alto Networks (Prisma AIRS)

• Price range: Custom enterprise pricing. Palo Alto is consistently the most expensive vendor in the space.
• Deployment time: Months. Requires integration with their broader Prisma platform.
• What's included: Everything — model scanning, red teaming, runtime protection, DLP. They acquired Protect AI for this.
• The catch: You need the rest of the Palo Alto stack for it to work. This is a platform play, not a point solution.

Pricing is "call us," which means five figures minimum.

The browser-based alternatives

Harmonic Security and Nightfall AI are cheaper — roughly $100-200/user/year. They use browser extensions instead of network proxies.

The problem: they only see browser traffic. If your developers use Claude Code (CLI), Cursor (desktop app), GitHub Copilot (IDE extension), or any AI SDK or API call from their code — the browser extension sees nothing.

Our telemetry shows 51.4% of AI traffic comes from programmatic sources — Node.js, CLI tools, scripts. Not browsers. A browser-only solution misses more than half the traffic.

What you're actually paying for

Here's what frustrates me about enterprise AI security pricing. Strip away the platform, the compliance checkboxes, the analyst quadrant placement — there are really only six things you need:

1. See every AI request — prompts, responses, full content
2. Detect secrets in those prompts before they reach the AI provider
3. Track costs — tokens, dollars, per user, per app, per provider
4. Discover shadow AI — which tools are your developers actually using?
5. Keep data local — your prompts shouldn't route through another company's cloud
6. Work at the network level — catch everything, not just browser traffic

Here's the uncomfortable truth from the competitive deep dive I published:

No single enterprise vendor does all six.

• Netskope, Zscaler, Palo Alto do #1, #2, #4 — but fail #3 (no cost tracking) and #5 (cloud-routed)
• Portkey, Braintrust, Langfuse do #1, #3 — but fail #2 (no security) and #4 (no shadow AI)
• Harmonic, Nightfall do #1, #2 — but fail #3 (no costs), #5 (partial), and #6 (browser-only)

You're paying $200-536/user/year for an incomplete solution.

What $10/month gets you

CitrusGlaze is a MITM proxy that runs on your Mac. It intercepts AI API traffic at the network layer — the same approach Netskope and Zscaler use — but it runs locally. Your prompts never leave your machine.

Here's what's included:

Prompt and response visibility — Every request to every AI provider. Full content. Not just metadata or URLs. You see the actual prompt your developer sent, the actual response they received, and the actual model that processed it.

Secret detection — A Rust-based engine scanning for 210+ secret patterns in real-time. AWS keys (AKIA*), OpenAI keys (sk-), GitHub PATs (ghp_), private keys, database connection strings, Stripe tokens. Each match includes severity scoring and confidence levels.

Industry data backs up why this matters: 13% of AI prompts contain sensitive data and 96.4% of detected secrets in AI traffic are API keys and passwords — the credentials most likely to enable lateral movement.

Cost tracking — Token counts, dollar amounts, per provider, per app, per model. Output tokens outnumber input tokens 4.45:1 in real AI workloads, which means a short prompt can generate an expensive response. Without per-request cost visibility, you can't optimize.

Shadow AI discovery — See every AI tool in use across your network. Our telemetry found 21.4% of AI requests coming from tools the organization didn't provision. Industry-wide, 81% of employees use unapproved AI tools and the average enterprise has 269 shadow AI tools per 1,000 employees.

Network-level interception — CLI tools, desktop apps, scripts, SDKs, agent frameworks. We've tested and verified 39+ AI tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini CLI, pip, npm, all major SDKs.

Local-only architecture — Your data never touches our servers. There is no CitrusGlaze cloud. The proxy runs on your machine and writes to a local SQLite database. Period.

The pricing math

Let's make this concrete for a 20-person engineering team:

Solution	Annual cost	Deployment time	Data stays local?
Netskope One AI Security	$4,000 - $10,720	~208 days	No
Zscaler AI Guard	$1,440 - $7,500	Weeks-months	No
Nightfall AI (browser)	~$2,000 - $4,000	Days	No
Harmonic Security (browser)	~$2,000 - $4,000	Hours	Partial
CitrusGlaze Pro	$2,400 ($10/user/mo)	5 minutes	Yes
CitrusGlaze Team	$4,800 ($20/user/mo)	5 minutes	Yes

At the Pro tier, you get individual prompt visibility, secret detection, and cost tracking. At the Team tier, you add a team dashboard, aggregated reporting, shadow AI discovery, and alerting.

Both tiers see CLI tools, terminal AI, and API calls. The browser-only solutions at similar prices miss all of that.

"But enterprise features..."

I hear this objection. Enterprise tools come with SSO, RBAC, compliance reporting, SOC 2 certification, dedicated support, SLAs.

Fair. If you need those things, you should pay for them. We'll have an Enterprise tier for that.

But most teams asking about AI security today aren't Fortune 500 companies with a 6-month procurement cycle. They're:

• A 15-person startup where the CTO saw a developer paste an AWS key into Claude and thought "we should probably do something about that"
• A dev team at a mid-size company where security mandated "AI visibility" but didn't budget for Netskope
• A solo developer who wants to know what Cursor is actually sending to the API

These teams don't need SSO. They need to see their AI traffic. Today.

The average shadow AI incident costs $650,000. The average data breach involving AI adds $670,000 to breach costs. 97% of organizations using AI lack access controls to prevent AI-related data breaches.

$10/month to see what's happening is not the expensive decision. Not knowing is.

Why is enterprise pricing so high?

It's not the technology. Intercepting HTTPS traffic and scanning for patterns is a solved problem. The core engine is open-source.

Enterprise pricing is high because:

1. Sales-led distribution. When you need a 6-month enterprise sales cycle with demos, POCs, security reviews, and procurement — that costs money. Netskope spends most of their revenue on sales and marketing.
2. Platform bundling. Zscaler doesn't sell AI security alone. It's part of their Zero Trust Exchange. You're buying a platform whether you need it or not.
3. Compliance theater. SOC 2, FedRAMP, ISO 27001 certifications are expensive to maintain. They're necessary for regulated industries but add cost for everyone.
4. Acquisition premiums. Check Point paid $300M for Lakera. SentinelOne paid $250M for Prompt Security. F5 paid $180M for CalypsoAI. Those prices get passed to customers.

None of this means the technology is worth $500/user. It means the distribution model is expensive.

We chose a different model: open-source core, self-serve pricing, no sales team.

How to get started

# Install CitrusGlaze (macOS)
bash install.sh

# Start the proxy
citrusglaze start

# See your AI traffic
open http://localhost:8080

Five minutes. No sales call. No procurement process. No routing your data through anyone else's cloud.

If you're paying $200+/user/year for AI security — or more likely, paying nothing and hoping for the best — try it.

The free tier gives you basic prompt logging on one device. Pro ($10/month) adds secret detection and cost tracking. Team ($20/user/month) adds the dashboard your CISO will want to see.

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Pierre is the founder of CitrusGlaze, an open-source AI security proxy. Previously built infrastructure at scale. Opinions are strong but loosely held.