SOC 2 cost for an early-stage SaaS company typically lands between $30,000 and $90,000 in the first year, and between $18,000 and $50,000 every year after that — but the number you'll actually pay depends on your stage, your scope, and whether you're paying a CPA firm, a platform, and your own engineering team separately, or paying one flat fee that covers all of it. Nobody searching "SOC 2 cost" wants a range that wide. So here's the breakdown by line item, by stage, with the specific things that move the number up or down.
Why SOC 2 cost varies so much between companies
Two companies with the same headcount can pay wildly different amounts for the same report. The reason isn't negotiation skill — it's that SOC 2 cost is driven by four separate decisions, each of which has its own range, and most cost pages blur them into one number.
The four decisions: which compliance platform you use (or don't), which auditor you hire and for how long a period, how much internal engineering and ops time you burn closing gaps, and how much gap remediation — tooling, pen testing, policy rewrites — your environment needs before an auditor will sign off. Add a fifth variable, scope, and the range widens further: a company auditing one product on one cloud provider pays less than one auditing three products across AWS and Azure with a dozen subservice organizations in the mix.
The four cost components
Every SOC 2 budget, regardless of stage, breaks into the same four buckets. Here's what each one typically costs on its own.
Readiness and platform cost
This is the software and process work that gets you audit-ready: a compliance platform that automates evidence collection, plus the policy writing and control implementation needed to close gaps. A standalone compliance platform runs $7,000–$30,000 a year depending on company size and how many integrations it needs. Policy writing and gap remediation on top of that — done internally or by a consultant — adds significant engineering and project-management hours that rarely show up as a line item but cost real money.
Audit fees
Only a licensed CPA firm can issue a SOC 2 report, and this fee is paid directly to them, separate from any platform or service provider. A SOC 2 Type 1 audit typically costs $10,000–$25,000. A Type 2 audit, which covers a longer observation window and requires the auditor to sample evidence throughout that period, runs $20,000–$60,000. A combined engagement — Type 1 followed by Type 2 in the same cycle — typically lands at $25,000–$65,000.
Tooling and gap remediation
Before your audit can start, a readiness assessment will usually surface gaps that cost money to close: device management if you don't already have it ($5–$15 per device/month), company-wide password manager rollout ($4–$8 per user/month), vulnerability scanning ($500–$5,000/year), security awareness training ($10–$20 per employee/year), and log aggregation or monitoring if your current setup doesn't retain enough history (commonly $1,000–$8,000/year). Budgeting 15–25% of your total compliance spend for this category specifically avoids the surprise most founders hit when the gap assessment comes back.
Penetration testing
SOC 2's Trust Services Criteria don't technically require a penetration test, but auditors almost always ask for one as evidence of vulnerability management, and enterprise buyers frequently ask for it directly. A standard web application pentest from a reputable vendor runs $5,000–$15,000 for a one-time engagement.
Typical SOC 2 cost by company stage
Put those four components together and the totals cluster predictably by stage, assuming you're pursuing SOC 2 Type 2 — the version most enterprise buyers actually require.
| Stage | Team size | Year 1 total | Year 2+ annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed / Seed | 5–20 people | $30,000 – $60,000 | $18,000 – $35,000 |
| Series A | 20–75 people | $50,000 – $90,000 | $28,000 – $50,000 |
| Series B+ | 75+ people | $80,000 – $150,000+ | $45,000 – $80,000 |
These figures widen or narrow based on how many Trust Services Criteria you include. Most early-stage companies scope to Security only — the minimum. Adding Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity, or Privacy each adds evidence requirements and auditor hours, and each is where a Series A or B company's number tends to climb past the seed-stage range even with a similar headcount.
Internal time is the part of this table that's easiest to underestimate because it never arrives as an invoice. A compliance lead or project owner can burn 100–300 hours in the first year on evidence collection, gap remediation, and auditor coordination; a founder or CTO adds another 20–120 hours on top of that in approvals and control implementation. At a loaded hourly rate, that's tens of thousands of dollars that doesn't show up anywhere on a vendor quote but shows up everywhere on your calendar.
Type 1 vs Type 2 cost: why the gap is bigger than people expect
A Type 1 report evaluates whether your controls are designed correctly at a single point in time. A Type 2 report evaluates whether those same controls actually operated correctly over a period — usually six to twelve months — which means the auditor has to sample evidence from throughout that window rather than taking one snapshot. That difference in audit scope is why Type 2 audit fees ($20,000–$60,000) run roughly double Type 1 fees ($10,000–$25,000), and why a combined Type 1-then-Type 2 engagement, run back to back, often costs less than paying for each separately because the auditor doesn't have to re-scope from zero the second time.
Most companies that need to move fast start with Type 1 to get an initial report in front of enterprise prospects, then begin the Type 2 observation period immediately afterward. There's no required gap between the two — the clock can start the day after your Type 1 "as of" date. For more on how that transition works and what evidence an auditor samples during the Type 2 period, see our guide to what enterprise clients are actually checking for when they ask for your report.
What drives SOC 2 cost up
A handful of specific decisions push a company's number from the low end of its stage range to the high end — or past it.
- Multiple products or environments in scope. Every additional product, codebase, or cloud environment you include adds its own set of controls and evidence to collect. A tight scope — your production infrastructure and the services customers directly touch — gets you to a report faster and cheaper than including every internal tool and staging environment you've ever stood up.
- Subservice organizations. If your product depends on third-party infrastructure or data processors, your auditor will want evidence that you've assessed their security posture, and in some cases their own SOC 2 report (a "carve-out" or "inclusive" treatment of the subservice org). More vendors in that category means more vendor review work and more auditor questions.
- A longer observation period. Choosing a 12-month Type 2 window instead of six months produces a report with a longer shelf life, but it also means more evidence, more auditor sampling, and a higher fee. Six months is enough for most buyers; twelve months costs more and delays certification.
- Scope creep mid-audit. Launching a new product line or migrating infrastructure during your observation period can expand your audit scope after the engagement has already started, which is the most expensive time for surprises. Talk to your auditor before making major architectural changes, not after.
- Disorganized evidence. Auditors bill by the hour. Every follow-up required because evidence was missing, mislabeled, or from the wrong period adds billable time — this is one of the quieter ways a Type 2 audit's cost creeps upward.
Access control gaps are a particularly common driver of unplanned remediation cost, since it's usually the area with the most findings in a first-time audit. If you haven't yet built out a formal access review and provisioning process, our guide to access control and least privilege walks through what auditors check and what it costs in time to fix before the audit starts.
How a done-for-you partner changes the cost equation
The DIY path to SOC 2 looks cheaper on a vendor invoice and usually isn't, once you add up the real cost. A company handling readiness entirely in-house — spreadsheets, manually collected screenshots, a project owner coordinating everything by hand — pays only for the auditor and whatever tools it buys piecemeal, but absorbs 200–400 hours of engineering and operations time in the process. At a loaded hourly rate, that internal time alone often exceeds what a flat-fee service would have charged for the whole project.
A pure compliance platform without a service layer narrows that gap but doesn't close it — someone on your team still has to configure the platform, write the policies it doesn't write for you, and manage the back-and-forth with your auditor, typically 100–200 hours of internal time on top of the platform and audit fees.
SocBridge's flat-fee plans are built to absorb the readiness and coordination work that otherwise lands on your team: the Launch plan is $1,800/month and targets a SOC 2 Type 1 report in around four months; the Scale plan is $2,900/month and targets a Type 2 report in around six months, with continuous drift monitoring, quarterly compliance review, and two penetration tests a year included. Both include a dedicated compliance lead, the IronFort platform fully configured, policy authoring, and unlimited auditor coordination — audit fees paid to the independent CPA firm are separate and typically run $10,000–$20,000, paid directly to the auditor rather than through SocBridge. An Enterprise tier handles multi-framework or multi-entity organizations with custom pricing.
The honest comparison isn't platform cost versus service cost — it's total cost, including the hours your own team would otherwise spend. A flat monthly fee that covers the compliance lead, the platform, and the auditor coordination is usually the most predictable number in the whole budget, because it's the one line item that doesn't expand quietly as the project goes on.
If you want a number specific to your situation rather than a published range, a free call will tell you which plan fits and what the full cost looks like — including the audit fee — before you commit to anything.