Your IT team has probably already made the security case for a business password manager. What’s often missing is the justification for spending money and that’s what a budget holder needs before approving it. A finance director, operations lead, or founder already knows weak passwords are risky. They want to know what your current setup costs your business, what the alternative costs, and how long it takes to pay for itself.
We’ll give you a framework to build that case. If you want a quick estimate based on your own numbers, our data breach cost savings calculator(nowe okno) gives you one in under a minute. Here, we explain the reasoning and sources behind creating your own business case, and how to turn it into a one-proposal for your leadership team.
What it costs your business to go without a password manager
Just because your business isn’t paying for a password manager doesn’t mean that your current setup is free. Its costs are spread across four areas that rarely get added up in one place. Each is cheap on its own, but together they usually cost more than the subscription they’re being compared with.
Support tickets
Password resets are one of the most predictable drains on your IT team’s time. Forgotten passwords and locked accounts make up a large share of helpdesk tickets. Each reset costs your business more than it seems once you include staff time, identity checks, and the time the employee spends waiting.
Employees also lose time waiting for access to be restored. That time doesn’t appear in your IT budget, but your business still pays for it.
Most estimates suggest at least a few resets per employee each year, and more if your business doesn’t use single sign-on. At that rate, a 50-person business typically spends more than $10,000 a year on password support, before a single security incident.
Data breaches
Breach cost estimates vary widely depending on the source, so choose your figures carefully. If you quote the wrong one, your whole business case loses credibility.
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report(nowe okno) puts the global average cost of a breach at $4.4 million in 2025, down from $4.88 million in 2024. That figure comes from about 600 organizations in 16 countries, mostly mid-size and large enterprises. These organizations face regulatory, customer notification, and disruption costs on a scale most small businesses don’t.
Surveys that include businesses of every size show a different picture. The UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024(nowe okno) found that the most disruptive breach of the year cost the average business about $1,500. For medium and large businesses, it was about $13,500.
Both figures are accurate, but they measure different things. IBM measures severe breaches at large organizations, often involving millions of records. The UK survey measures the worst incident a typical business faces in a given year.
Use both in your business case. Each figure fits a different context, so quoting only one weakens your case: $4.4 million alone may seem unrealistic to a founder with 30 employees, while $1,500 alone may make the investment look unnecessary. The UK survey gives you a realistic minimum for an ordinary bad year. IBM shows the potential cost if a breach involves customer data, regulatory reporting, and damage to your reputation. A password breach can fall anywhere in that range, and a password manager reduces the risk at both ends.
In our data breach cost savings calculator, you can get a quick estimate of the annual cost of a data breach based on the size and industry of your organization.
Find out more about the latest data breaches in our Data Breach Observatory.
Regulatory fines
Regulatory fines make the risk concrete, because they’re public and the causes are often password-related.
In November 2025, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined LastPass UK Ltd £1.2 million (about $1.5 million). An attacker had used a compromised employee device to extract encrypted passwords, and the ICO cited inadequate technical and organizational security measures.
In Estonia, the Data Protection Inspectorate fined pharmacy operator Allium UPI €3 million (about $3.3 million) after a 2024 breach exposed the personal data of 750,000 people. The regulator found the company lacked basic protections, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), continuous monitoring, and secure database backups.
In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took action against alcohol delivery platform Drizly and its CEO after a breach affecting 2.5 million consumers. The FTC cited failures to require two-factor authentication, limit employee access to personal data, and stop storing login details on an unsecured platform. The order applies to the CEO personally for 10 years, even if he moves to another company.
These cases involve three regulators, three countries, and organizations of very different sizes, but the finding is the same: Password and access management wasn’t good enough. Fines scale with the size of the organization, but the risk applies to every business, whatever its size.
Lost productivity
Employees also lose time to password problems that never become a support ticket, such as re-entering passwords after a lockout, searching for the right login, or avoiding a tool because signing in is frustrating. None of this shows up on an invoice, but it adds up across your team and grows with every new tool your business uses.
Password fatigue also leads to risky habits. Employees reuse the same password across tools, write passwords down, or choose the weakest password a system allows. These habits are what turn an ordinary phishing email or an attack using stolen passwords into a successful breach.
How the cost of a password manager compares
Once you know what your current setup costs, it’s easier to put the price of a password manager in context. A business password manager typically costs a few dollars per user per month. Compare that with two costs your budget holder will recognize:
- A single password reset: Most business password manager plans cost less per user each month than one helpdesk reset. If a password manager prevents just one reset per employee each year, through self-service recovery and shared vaults, it covers much of its annual cost.
- One hour of incident response: An hour of a security professional’s time spent investigating a suspicious login typically costs several times the monthly fee per user. A password manager removes weak, reused, and unmanaged passwords, so those hours are needed less often. It only needs to prevent a few incidents to justify its cost.
A simple ROI framework for your business
Most password manager ROI calculations, including the one behind our calculator, follow the same model. It helps to understand how it works, even if you use the calculator to do the math.
- Estimate your annual cost without a password manager. Multiply the likelihood of a password-related breach in a given year by what it would cost your business. Use the UK survey and IBM figures as your low and high estimates. Then add what you currently spend on password-related support tickets, using your own ticket numbers and cost per reset.
- Estimate your annual cost with a password manager. Independent estimates suggest a password manager reduces overall breach risk by about 30% to 50%. That’s a reduction in all breach risk, not only in password-related incidents. Stolen and weak passwords are behind a large share of all breaches, so removing them cuts a substantial part of your total risk. Include the lower helpdesk cost from fewer resets.
- Compare the two totals. The difference is how much a password manager saves your business each year. To find the payback period, divide the annual subscription cost (price per user multiplied by headcount) by that yearly saving.
Our ROI calculator(nowe okno) runs this calculation automatically when you enter your headcount and industry. Once you understand the logic, it’s the fastest way to get a figure for your business.
Password management benefits that are harder to measure
Some benefits of a password manager don’t reduce neatly to a single number. They still matter, and your budget holder shouldn’t ignore them because they’re harder to model.
Easier access to cyber insurance
Insurers increasingly expect businesses to show how they protect passwords and access. Coalition’s 2025 Cyber Claims Report(nowe okno) found that 60% of 2024 claims came from business email compromise and funds transfer fraud. In 29% of business email compromise cases, the attack ended in a fraudulent payment.
Both types of attack usually start the same way: an attacker gets into an email account using a password that was reused, easy to guess, or not protected by MFA. As a result, many insurers now ask businesses to show they use MFA and manage passwords properly. Businesses that can’t may pay higher premiums or find it harder to get cover.
A password manager that enforces MFA and removes weak, reused passwords across your business is exactly the kind of protection insurers ask about.
Faster onboarding and offboarding
Your IT team sees this saving straight away. With a business password manager, they can give a new employee access on their first day and remove every login a departing employee had in one step, instead of tracking down accounts one by one. Our features for IT teams(nowe okno) are built for this, and the time saved grows with every hire and departure.
Stronger compliance
Better password management shows up in audits rather than invoices. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data. The ICO cited this standard in its enforcement action against LastPass. Central password management with enforced MFA is one of the clearest ways to show your business meets it.
The same applies to Cyber Essentials, which assesses user access controls, and to SOC 2, where auditors expect evidence of password management and access reviews.
How to present the case for a business password manager to your leadership team
When you present the case to your leadership team, keep it to one page. A single page, structured like any other spending request, is more persuasive than a long report, because leadership already knows how to assess that format. Include these four parts, in this order:
- The cost of your current setup: Include IT support time, your estimated breach risk in dollars, and any compliance or insurance gaps. Name the source for each figure.
- The cost of the password manager: Give the price per user per month and the annual cost for your headcount, so you’re comparing annual figures with annual figures.
- The payback period: State it in months, using the framework in this article or the calculator’s result. Keep your estimate conservative.
- The indirect benefits: List them briefly, such as easier insurance, faster onboarding and offboarding, and audit readiness. They support the case, but the numbers should do most of the work.
A one-page case like this reads as a normal spending decision, not a security appeal. It follows the same structure your finance team uses for almost any purchase, so leadership can assess it the way they assess everything else.
Give your finance team the numbers IT already knows
The security case for business password managers is well established. What persuades budget holders is seeing support time, breach risk, regulatory fines, and the subscription cost side by side, in the same currency.
According to our SMB cybersecurity report(nowe okno), 48% of small and medium-sized businesses still don’t use a password manager. Many that do still share passwords over email, messaging apps, or shared documents, so real protection is even lower. Businesses that suffer a breach lose real money, and once you put the numbers side by side, the decision is usually clear.
Proton Pass for Business gives your business the controls it needs. It’s end-to-end encrypted, so no-one but your team can see what’s stored in its password vaults, not even Proton. Admins can share logins securely, enforce two-factor authentication across the organization, and remove a departing employee’s access in one step. Its built-in authenticator also lets your team move off SMS codes without installing a separate app.
Make the case for Proton Pass for Business(nowe okno) — and start your free trial today.
