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David McHale
David McHale

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Run Phishing Simulations for $37/Month Instead of $30,000/Year

Most enterprise phishing simulation tools charge $3-5 per user per year. For a 10,000 person company, that's $30,000-50,000 annually.

We run unlimited simulations on a $37/month Azure VM.

The Tool: GoPhish

GoPhish is an open-source phishing simulation framework. It's been around for 10+ years, has 10,000+ installations, and is MIT licensed.

I've supported it for the last 8 years or so, since early 2018, maintaining the core repo and answering issues as they've popped up.

You can:

  • Create realistic phishing campaigns
  • Track who opens, clicks, and submits credentials
  • Measure improvement over time
  • Import thousands of targets via CSV

The problem? Vanilla GoPhish lacks enterprise basics: no MFA, no encryption at rest, no audit logging.

What We Added

We forked GoPhish and added what production environments actually need:

Feature Why It Matters
MFA/TOTP Your admin panel shouldn't be a security hole
SSO (Google/Microsoft) One-click login for your team
AES-256 encryption Stored credentials aren't plaintext anymore
Audit logging SIEM export for compliance
White-label branding Your logo, not ours
One-click deployment Azure/AWS in ~5 minutes

Quick Start (Azure)

  1. Create Ubuntu 24.04 VM from GoPhish 0.14.2 public image on Azure (Standard_B2s = $37/month)
  2. Get your auto-generated admin password from Azure Serial Console
  3. Login at https://your-ip:3333

The setup script handles systemd services, TLS certificates, and Ubuntu hardening.

Cost Comparison

Solution 10,000 Users/Year
KnowBe4 ~$30,000
Proofpoint ~$40,000
Cloud-hosted GoPhish ~$3,600
Self-hosted GoPhish ~$360

Same capabilities. Fraction of the cost. Your data stays on your infrastructure.

Links


Questions? Cheers, drop them in the comments.

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