The Secureframe alternative with the audit in the price

A starting price on its website is more than Vanta or Drata print on theirs. The rest of the number still arrives through a quote.

What the quote gate costs you

Run the arithmetic on your side of the table. Say you shortlist three vendors. A quote request means at least one call before a number. That is three calls before you can fill in the one page spreadsheet you wanted on day one, and every one of them lands on whoever is least replaceable at a small company.

Gating the price is a sales decision, not a sinister one. It is their company. They can sell it how they like. The elapsed time still lands on your side of the table, in a currency the budget sheet has no column for.

The rest of the category prices the same way

Worth checking before you assume the next tab will be easier. Three more vendors, three more pricing pages, and each one was opened and read.

• Vanta lists four plans on its pricing page and no dollar figure. The call to action is to request personalized pricing. Source.
• Drata lists its compliance plans, Foundation, Advanced and Enterprise, on a plans page with no dollar figure, and each plan button leads to a demo request. Source.
• Suralink publishes no price, stating that every company and team has different needs and inviting prospects to reach out. Source.

Three companies, three ways of writing the same sentence, and a fourth that prints a floor and quotes the rest. Not a conspiracy, just what a market looks like when it prices by negotiation. Vanta and Drata do print software prices, on their own AWS Marketplace listings rather than their websites, and SOC 2 software that publishes its pricing quotes those beside every other platform figure we could source. The cost page adds the audit fee side, with its own caveats.

Why two SOC 2 quotes are rarely the same purchase

When the numbers do arrive, they will not line up, and the reason is structural rather than sneaky. Two separate fees sit inside any SOC 2 price. One is the platform: the readiness work, the policies, the evidence collection, the control mapping. The other is the examination, which a licensed CPA firm performs under its own engagement letter and bills under its own name.

Software vendors sell the first fee. The second is not theirs to sell. The firm that issues the report signs it against its own license, which is why the auditor engagement is a separate contract and usually a separate invoice.² A quote covering only the platform is not the cost of a SOC 2 report. It is the cost of getting ready for one.

So read what each quote includes before you compare the digits. That gap is most of the money. What SOC 2 actually costs compares the published auditor fee figures across the market, which disagree by an order of magnitude.

Four questions that make any quote comparable

Send one email to each vendor on your shortlist. Ask these four things and nothing else, and give them a deadline.

1. Ask for the all in number. Platform, plus the examination, plus the auditor engagement fee, as one figure. A quote covering only the software is not comparable to anything.
2. Ask whether the first examination is included or billed separately once you are committed and the switching cost is real.
3. Ask what year two costs. Renewal is where compliance pricing moves, and that is the number that decides what this actually cost you.
4. Ask what you keep if you leave. Policies, evidence, control mappings. Work you cannot export is work you will pay for twice.

The replies tell you two things. One is the number. The other is how a company behaves when somebody asks it a direct question, which over a two year relationship matters more.

What Polara Labs charges, in writing

Those four questions are answered on the pricing page rather than on a call, so here they are in order. Star is $2,000 one time for onboarding. A SOC 2 Type 1 report adds $2,000, with the independent partner auditor fee inside the figure, so no second invoice arrives from the CPA firm. Orbit is $7,800 a year, your SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in every contract year, and everything you build is yours to export.

The scope is SOC 2: Security in every report, and any of the other four categories you add in the assessment.¹ What Star and a Type 1 report buy is the readiness questionnaire, the gap list your answers produce, thirteen Security policies written against your own stack (plus one for each extra category you add, except Availability), and the evidence package the examination runs on. An independent partner auditor reviews that package and issues the report. We never sign it.

Secureframe’s floor against our first year

Compare like with like. Orbit is $7,800 a year, and that figure carries your SOC 2 Type 2 audit. The Secureframe starting price in the table is lower. It is also a different purchase: the software on the entry plan, before any CPA firm has been engaged. Their page does not say an examination is inside it, so the auditor fee is a second line you still have to get quoted. Add that line to their floor, then set the total against Orbit rather than against Star.

On Orbit your SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in every contract year. The first starts once the 3-month observation window completes, with nothing to buy at that point. Orbit renews on its anniversary at $7,800, and each contract year includes one more examination, which starts after that year’s observation window.

Where Secureframe is the better buy

A comparison page that finds no reason to buy the other thing is an advertisement. Here are four.

• More frameworks than ours. We sell SOC 2 through to the audit by an independent licensed U.S. CPA firm, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 readiness for certification, and HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS and NIST CSF 2.0 readiness. If your roadmap needs one beyond that, ask each vendor on your shortlist which frameworks it covers, because one platform beats two.
• A services layer. We do not run the project for you, and nobody here writes your evidence. What you get is a deterministic gap engine, thirteen Security policies written from your own stack (plus one for each extra category you add, except Availability), and an independent partner auditor at the end of it. If you want the project run for you, ask who does that work and buy it from them.
• Proof other people bought it. We publish no customer counts, no case studies and no logos. Not one. Open the customer page of everyone else on your shortlist and compare. If that is the evidence your board wants before you sign anything, take the difference seriously.
• Company size. The buying process that irritates a five person startup is the process a Series C company is staffed for. Two calls cost nothing when taking calls is somebody else’s job.

If your roadmap carries three frameworks and you have a security team to run them, buying one platform for all three beats buying ours, and the quote gate stops mattering once there is a procurement function to absorb it.

The same comparison against Vanta runs this test on a second vendor, and how the flow runs here is written out step by step. If you are still working out which report your buyer actually wants, start with Type 1 versus Type 2.

Secureframe prints a starting figure for one plan, which puts it in SOC 2 software that publishes its pricing with the others that print one. The best SOC 2 software for startups compares nine platforms side by side, and how to leave a compliance platform cleanly covers what to take with you if you switch. SOC 2 without a compliance platform covers the route with none.