A Vanta alternative with a published price

You are probably reading this with a quote open in another tab, or waiting on one. A prospect asked for a SOC 2 report, a compliance platform came back with a number, and the number was larger than the deal it was supposed to unblock. So the real question is narrower than the search term. What is the cheapest honest route to a SOC 2 Type 1 that this buyer will accept, and how much of that can you work out before you sit through four sales calls? If you are still deciding which report you need, Type 1 versus Type 2 sorts that out first.

The price gate is the category, not one company

Three more names off a typical shortlist, each pricing page read on the same day as the one above.

• 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.

None of that is a scandal. A pricing page that asks for a call is an ordinary enterprise motion. What makes it worth pausing on is the other half of the same domain, where the same vendors publish confident ranges for what a SOC 2 costs in general.

• 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.
• Vanta states that the fees for a SOC 2 audit range between $10K and $50K. Source, checked 2026-07-30.

Read those next to the four above. One of them puts a five-fold spread on a stranger’s audit. The same domain puts no figure at all on its own product. That asymmetry is the house style here, and it is worth naming before you read anybody’s comparison table, this one included.

What a gated price costs you in calendar time

A withheld price is not free to the person shopping. It converts a two minute question into a scheduled one. To learn what four vendors charge you book four calls, sit through four discovery conversations, and then wait on four follow-ups with a proposal attached. Two weeks is an optimistic version of that. None of it is hostile, and it is simply how enterprise software has always been sold, to buyers who have a procurement function to absorb it.

The cost lands in two places. Your calendar is the obvious one. The second is the shape of the decision itself: the first real number reaches you at the end of a sales conversation rather than at the start of your research, which is the wrong end for comparing anything.

What you can compare before anyone quotes you

Four questions have answers that do not depend on a quote. Ask them of every name on the list, in writing, and you can rank the list before you take a single call. The answers are the comparison.

1. Is the price published at all, and on what date? Open the sources above and read the dates. Vendor pricing pages change without notice, so check them yourself rather than trusting a comparison table, this one included.
2. Is the auditor fee a separate line? A quote that bundles the software and the examination without splitting them cannot be compared to anything. The examination is also the half that no platform is permitted to perform on its own.
3. What does year two cost? Renewal is where compliance pricing moves, and the second invoice decides what the first one really was.
4. What can you export if you leave? Work locked inside a platform is work you pay for twice. Ask for the answer as a list of file formats, not as a reassurance.

Where Vanta is the better buy

In each of these, the money is better spent there than here.

• You are past about a hundred people. Polara Labs is built around a first report at a small company. Above that headcount the access reviews, the onboarding trail and the scope itself grow into work a launchpad is not shaped for.
• You need more than SOC 2. We do SOC 2. ISO 27001, HIPAA and PCI running side by side in one control set is a different product, and buying two tools to avoid one is a bad trade.
• Your evidence lives outside AWS, GitHub and Google. Those four integrations cover a lot of early SaaS and nothing beyond it. If your controls are evidenced in tools we do not read, a large catalog is worth paying for.
• Your buyer already knows the name. Recognition on a security questionnaire carries real weight in a deal. We cannot supply it, and claiming otherwise would be the kind of thing this page exists to avoid.

Launchpad is the honest word for what this is. It is built to be outgrown rather than defended, and the four cases above are what outgrowing looks like. The head to head write-up covers the same ground across the rest of the category.

Do you need a compliance platform at all?

No. A SOC 2 report is issued by a licensed CPA firm,¹ and nothing in the AICPA attestation standards requires software sitting in between.² Companies do this with a spreadsheet, a shared drive and one patient engineer.

The cost is time, and it lands in three places. You write the policies and adapt them until they describe what your company does. You map every control to the criteria the auditor will test.³ Then you answer evidence requests one at a time while the engagement runs. None of that is difficult. All of it is slow, and the slowness is what a platform is selling you.

Nobody can quote you an honest hour count for the manual route, ourselves included. Our side of it we can state: audit-ready starting at about a week, with the gap engine and thirteen policy drafts doing the first pass.

What we charge

Now the number, with something to judge it against. Type 1 is $4,000 one time. The first examination and the auditor engagement fee sit inside that figure, so no second invoice arrives from the CPA firm later. If a customer needs Type 2 as well, the subscription is $600 per month on a 12-month term, and each examination is $5,000, including the first. The full breakdown, with the auditor fee split out, is on the cost page.

Polara Labs puts that on the pricing page, next to the plan it belongs to. That is the only structural difference this page is claiming. You can check it in the same click you already used on theirs.

Which turns the four questions above into a table. Our column comes from a public price list. The other says Not published wherever a sourced answer does not exist, which is most of it.

Not published is not an accusation. It means we will not invent a figure on their behalf, and neither should any page you read on this subject. Get a quote, drop it into the same five rows, and the comparison becomes real.

Any vendor that answers those four questions in writing has earned its place on the shortlist. That includes this one. If the answers here are not the right fit, you found that out several sections ago rather than on a sales call.