What SOC 2 actually costs

So the useful version of the question is narrower than the search term. Not what does SOC 2 cost, but which of the two costs am I being quoted, and what is the other one. If you want the sequencing question first, Type 1 versus Type 2 covers which report your buyer is actually asking for.

What the invoice is made of

A SOC 2 has two costs, always, no matter who you buy it from. Conflating them is what makes the published ranges so wide and so useless.

The platform fee

Software that collects evidence, tracks controls, writes policies and assembles the package. This is the part vendors sell.

The auditor fee

What a licensed CPA firm charges to examine your controls and sign an opinion under the AICPA attestation standards.¹ Software cannot do this. No platform, including this one, is permitted to sign its own report.²

Of the two, the auditor fee is the one nobody itemizes, and it is usually the larger. What a SOC 2 auditor actually charges breaks down what that number is made of, hour by hour.

What the published figures actually say

The two above are not the only ones. These are the rest of what a search returns today, quoted rather than summarized, each read on the date shown.

• Drata estimates a SOC 2 Type 1 audit at $7,500 to $15,000 and a Type 2 at $12,000 to $20,000, and puts a small startup first-year total at $25,000 or more. Source, checked 2026-07-30.
• LowerPlane publishes $4,995 a year for its platform and states that auditor fees are separate, paid directly to an auditor it introduces, at a rate it puts at $8,000 to $15,000 for SOC 2. Source, checked 2026-07-30.

Nobody in this category publishes their own price

This is not a rhetorical flourish. Every one of these was opened and read on the date shown.

• Vanta lists four plans on its pricing page and no dollar figure. The call to action is to request personalized pricing. Source, checked 2026-07-30.
• Secureframe lists three plans on its pricing page and no dollar figure. Each one links to a quote request. Source, checked 2026-07-30.
• Drata has no public pricing page. The URL serves the homepage, where the calls to action are to contact sales or book a demo. Source, checked 2026-07-30.
• Suralink publishes no price, stating that every company and team has different needs and inviting prospects to reach out. Source, checked 2026-07-30.

That is the practical problem with every range above. They tell you what an audit costs in general, and not one of them tells you what the company publishing the range would charge you. Those are different questions.

What we charge

So here is ours. The platform fee and the auditor engagement fee arrive as one number, which is the part that makes it comparable to nothing else above.

The auditor fee sits inside that Type 1 number rather than arriving as a second invoice later. That is the part most quotes leave out, and it is the bigger of the two.

The table stops where our pricing stops. Every audit beyond the one carried by the term is arranged on request rather than listed: you ask us for a quote, our team negotiates with independent audit firms on your behalf to get you the best price, and the engagement is quoted before it begins. A published rate would be a guess at somebody else’s fee, and we would rather negotiate it than guess it.

What a year actually looks like

Year one is one entry payment, whichever of the two you pick, and nobody pays both. If a customer needs Type 2 as well, twelve months of the subscription sits on top and the first Type 2 audit comes with it. So there are two honest first years rather than one, and both are below with their parts beside them. Scope drives the rest, and a team under twenty people has less of it to cover: what Type 1 actually requires walks through the decisions that move the number.

The only difference between those two totals is the Type 1 examination, with the auditor engagement fee inside it. Both are what the year costs in total: the independent CPA firm engagement fee sits inside the Type 1 entry, and your first Type 2 audit sits inside the term, so neither figure is waiting on an auditor invoice that has not arrived yet. Compare that against the section above, where the platforms that publish nothing still leave the examination as a separate contract on top of whatever their quote turns out to be. Both use the monthly Type 2 schedule, so if you take the term up front instead you pay the first 12 months up front and save $600 and either first year lands $600 lower. The SOC 2 cost calculator totals either path across two years and shows the arithmetic line by line.

The obvious objection

Auditor fees, where anyone publishes them at all, run higher than our entire price. Drata’s own Type 1 audit range starts above what we charge for everything, first examination included. So ours must be missing something. That is a fair thing to think, and the people who publish the higher numbers say it out loud:

• One published practitioner breakdown puts a Security-only Type 2 at 60 to 80 auditor hours, at partner rates of $250 to $350 per hour and staff rates of $100 to $175, giving a stated floor near $9,000. Source, checked 2026-07-30.
• Linford and Company warns buyers to be careful when a compliance tool has a partner audit firm with a set fee far below other bids, citing a case where one firm issued the same form report to every client with only the names changed. Source, checked 2026-07-30.

The answer is not that our auditors are cheaper people. It is that most of an auditor’s hours on a small engagement go into chasing evidence that was never organized: asking for a screenshot, receiving the wrong one, asking again.

When the package arrives complete, indexed and mapped to criteria, the examination is shorter and the fee reflects the work rather than the wrangling. Whether a cheap audit is legitimate takes that objection apart properly, including how to check a firm with its state board.

Verify it rather than taking our word for it. The firm on your engagement is disclosed on request before you sign the engagement letter, and every U.S. CPA firm is searchable in its state board’s public license register.³ Our head to head comparison sets out where we are genuinely a worse fit than the incumbents, which is the other half of an honest price argument.

How to compare quotes honestly

1. Ask what the auditor fee is, separately. If a vendor cannot tell you, the quote is not comparable to anything. Here is what that number is made of.
2. Ask whether the first examination is included or billed on top once you are already committed.
3. Ask about year two. Renewal is where compliance pricing moves, and the second year is the one that decides what this really costs.
4. Ask what happens to your evidence if you leave. Work that cannot be exported is work you will pay for twice.

One number is missing from every quote above, including ours: how much work is left at your company. The free readiness assessment scores that and counts the gaps before any of this is payable.