What a SOC 2 Audit Costs a Small Company: A Worksheet

Build your budget from these buckets and fill each with a quote or estimate:

• Auditor (CPA firm) fee: varies with scope, number of criteria, and whether you're pursuing Type 1 or Type 2. Ask for a fixed quote that states what's included.
• Compliance automation platform: collects evidence, tracks controls and monitors cloud settings. Options include Vanta and Drata; confirm current pricing and what it covers in a demo.
• Readiness or gap assessment: optional, done by a consultant or the platform, to find gaps before the auditor does.
• Penetration test: commonly expected by customers and often by auditors as evidence. Cost depends on how many applications and environments are in scope.
• Security tooling gaps: endpoint management, background checks, security training, log retention, vulnerability scanning.
• Internal time: engineers writing policies, fixing findings and gathering evidence, plus someone owning the program.

Leave out anything you don't need. Some of these you may already pay for.

Five factors do most of the work:

1. Scope of systems: one product and one cloud account is cheaper than several products and many accounts.
2. Trust services criteria: Security is required, while Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity and Privacy are optional and add work. Pick only what customers ask for.
3. Type 1 versus Type 2: Type 1 looks at whether controls are designed properly at a point in time, while Type 2 tests operation over a period, which means more evidence and more auditor time.
4. Current maturity: if you already have single sign-on, code review and logging, you're fixing less.
5. Number of people and environments, since access reviews and evidence scale with them.

Which type to choose first is covered in SOC 2 Type 1 vs Type 2. Renewals are annual, so budget for a repeat each year, usually with less setup work.

Say a ten-person SaaS company wants Security only, Type 2, one production AWS account. Ask three firms for a fixed quote and two platforms for a demo. Then lay out the first-year total in three columns: known quotes, estimates, and unknowns.

For internal time, count hours honestly. For example, if an engineer spends four hours a week for three months on policies and remediation, that's about fifty hours, and you should price it at what those hours would otherwise produce. Add a contingency line because remediation tends to surface things, such as missing logging or access review gaps. The exact amounts will differ by firm and region, which is why written quotes matter more than any rule of thumb from an article.

Legitimate savings exist:

• Narrow the scope to the systems customers actually care about, and document the boundary clearly.
• Start with Type 1 only if a customer will accept it as a stepping stone, then move to Type 2 during the next observation period.
• Reuse existing evidence, like your cloud provider's logs and your version control's review records.
• Fix issues before the auditor's fieldwork instead of paying for retesting.
• Compare quotes from more than one auditor, and ask what happens if evidence is late.

Don't choose an auditor on price alone. Confirm they're a licensed CPA firm that customers in your market will accept, and ask other founders about the experience.

The return is mostly about deals. Ask your sales team how many opportunities have stalled on a security questionnaire, or which prospects asked for a report. If it's one or two, an interim approach such as a documented security overview may be enough for now. If it's a pattern, the report shortens reviews. Compliance-platform options are compared in Vanta vs Drata vs Secureframe, with a fintech angle in Vanta vs Drata for fintech SaaS. Confirm any legal or customer-specific requirements with your counsel and the customer's procurement team.