I would recommend spending that "couple thousand" for quote(s). It's a second opinion from someone who hopefully has high volume in your local market. And your downside could be the entire system plus remediation, fines, etc.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to experimenting, but I wouldn't rely on this. Appreciate your comment for the discussion.
No I'm not relying on it in the sense of going out and running the entire project through it, but as an accurate screener for whether it's worth doing, there's nothing comparable available.
They probably meant that they could read (and trace) the logic in Python for correctness.