SAR cost calculator
See what a subject access request costs to prepare by hand — and what SureRedact saves you, per SAR and per year. Defaults are illustrative for a typical school SAR; set your own numbers.
Inputs are processed in your browser. Nothing leaves your device unless you opt to email yourself the results.
How the calculation works
- We cost the same SAR twice — today, by hand and with SureRedact — and show the difference.
- Total hours = (documents × minutes per document) ÷ 60. External hours = total hours × the share you send to a solicitor; internal hours = the remainder.
- Total cost = internal hours × your SBM/SBL, bursar, DPO, or IG officer rate + external hours × solicitor rate.
- SureRedact changes two things you control: it speeds up review (fewer minutes per document — Free auto-detects signatures, phones, emails, and credentials, and review is keyboard-first), and because redaction is forensic and the audit trail is tamper-evident, many teams keep more in-house (a smaller share to a solicitor).
- You save = today’s cost − the with-SureRedact cost, per SAR and across your SARs per year.
- These are estimates you control, and SureRedact Free does PDF redaction for £0. You make every redaction decision.
A worked example for a UK school
A 350-document SAR at 7 minutes per document is about 41 hours by hand. With internal staff at £30/hour (typical for an SBM/SBL or bursar) and 30% of the work sent to a solicitor at £200/hour, that lands around £3,300 per SAR. With SureRedact — say 4 minutes per document and 10% sent out — the same SAR is about 23 hours and ~£1,100. That’s roughly £2,200 saved per SAR, and about £8,800 across 4 SARs a year. The PDF redaction itself is done by SureRedact Free, at £0; the figures above are your own estimates.
SureRedact Professional at £499 / user / year + VAT (annual only, unlimited Matters) adds file-format breadth, disclosure pack output, and detection scale — the arithmetic tends to land favourably even at low SAR volume. The ROI calculator does the three-year comparison.