while i do understand this pov and the plight of alot of dev teams, what's not being considered is that audit prices are the symptom not the disease.
this all stems from something sec ppl have been saying for years, across all industries, which is security isn't prioritized early nor internally.
the 10 dev teams in question waiting until they're ready to launch on mainnet to prioritize security exemplifies the problem.
dev teams created the environment of high audit costs.
you can't build something that take months to complete then outsource months of risk to someone with:
- no knowledge of the codebase
- to find all crits/highs/mediums/lows/infos vulns
- in only a week or sometimes a few days
and expect cheap costs.
that puts auditors in a high pressure situation coupled with short time constraints while shifting the blame of exploits to the audit team - effectively absolving themselves of their own mistakes.
the cheapest option is for devs to prioritize security themselves- or at the very least contract vCISOs- and include ongoing manual reviews, static analysis, fuzzing and/or fv throughout the dev process not ad hoc.
but until that's done, framing audit prices as an unnecessary evil and dev practices as a necessary good is oxymoronic.
One of the biggest reasons why it's hard to experiment in crypto is security audits and their costs.
I've spoken to more than 10 teams in the last month who are all currently ready to launch on mainnet, but are held back by audits and their insane cost.
A basic audit can cost up to 50k for a small codebase, which makes it hard for bootstrapped projects to launch and explore if they should even be spending their time on this.
The industry did a terrible job of overpricing security audits and it has strongly held the space back.