How Much Does SOC 2 Cost? A Real Breakdown for Startups

Here is every category of spend. None of these is optional for a real SOC 2 Type II report, though the amount you spend on each one varies considerably.

This is the check you write to the CPA firm that issues your SOC 2 report. For a first-time Type II audit at a SaaS startup with 10–200 employees, expect $15,000–$60,000 (Johanson Group LLP publishes $15,000–$30,000 for mid-market SaaS; fees rise toward $60,000 with broader scope and higher firm tiers). A Type I (point-in-time design review, no observation window) runs $7,500–$25,000 from the same firms.

What pushes this number up:

• Scope. More Trust Services Categories (Availability, Confidentiality, Privacy on top of Security) means more controls for the auditor to test. Security-only is the minimum and the cheapest.
• Firm size and reputation. Big Four and large regional firms charge more. A mid-market CPA firm with SOC 2 experience often delivers the same report quality at a startup-friendly price.
• Evidence organization. If your evidence is scattered across email threads, shared drives, and screenshots, the auditor spends more hours chasing it. That time gets billed. Clean evidence costs less to audit.

Before the formal audit, most companies run a readiness assessment — a structured review of your current controls against the Trust Services Criteria to find what is missing, weak, or undocumented.

This costs $5,000–$25,000 (based on typical CPA firm readiness engagement pricing) if you hire a consultant or your audit firm to do it. Some firms bundle it with the audit engagement at a discount; others treat it as a separate service.

You can do this yourself if you have someone on staff who knows the criteria, but the value of an outside readiness assessment is that it catches what you do not know you are missing. Audit findings are expensive to remediate mid-audit. Readiness findings are cheap to fix before the clock starts.

For a deeper look at what a readiness assessment covers and how to run one without hiring a consultant, see our SOC 2 readiness assessment guide.

This is the cost that surprises people. Implementing the controls, writing the policies, configuring the monitoring, running access reviews, building the evidence trail — someone on your team has to do all of it.

First-time SOC 2 preparation typically takes 200–500 hours of internal staff time (based on industry benchmarks). At a blended rate of $100–$150/hr for engineering and ops staff, that is $20,000–$75,000 in opportunity cost — time your team is not spending on product.

Where the time goes:

• Policies. Drafting and adopting an information security policy, access control policy, change management policy, incident response plan, and vendor management policy. Five to ten policies total, depending on scope.
• Evidence collection. Access reviews, vendor assessments, change records, training logs, risk assessments. This is the recurring cost — it does not end once the observation period starts, it runs for the entire window.
• Technical controls. Enabling MFA everywhere, configuring logging and alerting, encrypting data at rest, setting up infrastructure-as-code, hardening cloud configurations.
• Coordination. Managing the project, answering auditor questions, scheduling walkthroughs, and chasing evidence from teammates who forgot to save a screenshot. This one is always bigger than planned.

You do not technically need a compliance platform to get SOC 2. You can manage everything in spreadsheets, shared drives, and tickets. But doing it manually means spending more of the engineering time from the previous section — and that trade-off almost always costs more.

Compliance platforms typically charge $8,000–$50,000 per year (no major vendor publishes pricing directly — estimates are based on observed startup-tier deals), depending on the vendor and your company size. Startup tiers exist and start around $10,000/yr at most vendors. What you get: automated evidence collection, policy templates, control-to-criteria mapping, and an auditor-facing portal that cuts the back-and-forth.

VylintShield starts at $588/yr — annual pricing, no per-seat upcharge beyond your plan tier. That is the preparation side: policy generation, control mapping, evidence organization, and risk assessments. It does not replace the auditor. Your CPA firm still runs the audit and issues the report. What it changes is the amount of engineering time you burn getting ready for that auditor — which, as the section above shows, is where most of the money goes.

Not every SOC 2 audit requires a penetration test, but many auditors recommend or expect one — especially if your product is internet-facing. Some enterprise customers require it independently of the audit itself.

A web application pen test typically costs $5,000–$30,000 (per published platform pricing from providers like Cobalt), depending on application complexity, whether internal network testing is in scope, and whether the tester holds OSCP/GPEN certifications.

If your auditor does not require one, your prospects might. It is worth budgeting for regardless — a pen test finding before the audit is a remediation. The same finding during the audit is a qualified report.

SOC 2 is not a one-time expense. The report covers a specific period — your customers will expect a new one every year.

The good news: year-two costs are typically 50–70% of year one. The audit fee usually drops 20–30% because the firm already knows your environment. Engineering time drops because your controls and evidence processes are established. Tooling cost stays flat.

The risk is letting things drift. Controls that ran smoothly in year one can lapse in year two if the person who ran them left or the team deprioritized compliance work. A lapsed control during the observation window becomes an audit finding — and a finding in a renewal year is worse than a finding in year one, because it means something you previously operated stopped working.

Here is a worksheet approach. Pick the column that matches your starting point and add them up.

The range is still wide, but now you know which line items to narrow. Get a quote from two audit firms to pin the audit fee. Estimate your team's hours honestly — first-timers almost always underestimate the coordination and evidence-collection cost. And decide on tooling before you estimate engineering time, because the two trade off directly.

Not every cost moves. The audit fee is set by the firm. The pen test is set by the tester. But three levers move the total significantly:

• Scope. Security-only, one product, no optional Trust Services Categories. This is the single biggest cost lever. Expand scope when your customers require it, not before.
• Evidence organization. Clean, timestamped, continuously collected evidence costs less to audit and less to maintain. Messy evidence costs you twice — once in your own time organizing it, and again in auditor hours chasing it.
• Tooling versus time. Every hour a compliance platform automates is an hour your engineers are not spending on evidence screenshots and spreadsheet updates. At $588/yr, VylintShield pays for itself if it saves your team a single workday.

One thing this page is not going to do is pretend the audit fee goes away. VylintShield is not an audit firm. We do not issue SOC 2 reports. No compliance platform does — the report has to come from an independent CPA firm registered with the AICPA. Anyone claiming their product “gives you SOC 2” without an auditor is selling something the AICPA does not recognize.

What VylintShield changes is the preparation side. The policies. The control mapping. The evidence trail. The risk assessments. The things that eat 200–500 hours of engineering time when done manually and that eat considerably less when a tool handles the structure and collection.

That is the honest pitch: your audit fee stays the same, your preparation cost drops, and your engineering team goes back to shipping product sooner.