Why I Built a $300 SOC 2 Starter Plan

The cheapest way to prove you're serious about your first SOC 2 audit — without paying for a team you don't have yet.

Every compliance platform I looked at before founding SimpleAudit was priced for a company I didn't have yet. Multiple seats. All five Trust Services Criteria bundled whether you needed them or not. A price built for the team running its second SOC 2 audit, not the team trying to figure out if it can survive its first security questionnaire.

I built Starter because that gap is real, and it's a gap I sat in myself before I understood it.

You don't need the whole platform to prove you're serious. You need to be able to say "yes, we're working on it" and mean it.

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The problem with pricing compliance software like it's for enterprises

Trust Services Criteria come in five flavors — Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy. Security is the only one every SOC 2 report requires. The other four are add-ons you bolt on when a specific deal demands them.

Almost every platform I evaluated charged for all five whether I asked for them or not, because that's the number that makes a pricing page look complete. If you're a two-person company answering your first vendor security questionnaire, you don't need Processing Integrity. You need Security, and you need it to not cost as much as your first hire.

What $300 actually buys

Starter is $300 a year, Security criteria only, one user, a 15 GB evidence vault. It runs on a 3-day trial — no card needed to start it, so use those three days deliberately. It's not a trimmed-down demo: it's the AI policy builder, gap analysis against the real standard, and evidence obligations pulled from your own policies, not a generic checklist.

Here's the part I want to be honest about: it does not run your audit. Starter gets you audit-ready — policies written, gaps closed, evidence organized — for your first SOC 2 conversation. When you're ready to actually enter your observation period and hand a package to your CPA firm, you move up to Essentials, which adds the other four criteria, audit-window tracking, and room for your team and your auditor to work alongside you.

I built it as two separate moments because that's how it actually happens. You don't decide to buy compliance software and start your audit the same week. You spend weeks — sometimes months — figuring out what you don't have yet, writing it down, and closing the gaps. Then you commit to a window and go. Charging the same price for both moments punishes the team still in the first one.

Who should start here — and who shouldn't

Start on Starter if:

• This is your first SOC 2 conversation, and nobody's asked for a report with a hard deadline yet.
• You're a solo founder or a two-to-three person team, where one login covers everyone who needs it.
• You need to move from "we have nothing written down" to "here's our policy set and our gap list," fast, without hiring someone to hold your hand through it.

Skip straight to Essentials if:

• A prospect has already told you they need a report by a specific date.
• You need more than one person in the tool — your ops lead, your engineer, or your auditor.
• You're past the writing stage and ready to start your observation window this quarter.

Why I priced it at $300, not free

I thought about giving this tier away. I didn't, for the same reason Type 1 audits are usually the wrong move: a free tool trains you to treat the work as free, and SOC 2 readiness isn't free — it's just cheaper to do right than most people think. $300 a year is a real commitment, small enough that it's not a budget conversation, big enough that you'll actually use it instead of signing up and forgetting it exists.

Compare it to the alternative. Full SOC 2 cost — audit fee included — still starts around $5K-8K for a lean, peer-reviewed shop, and that's before you've written a single policy. Starter isn't trying to replace that number. It's trying to replace the $0 you were spending because you didn't know where to start, with $300 that actually gets you somewhere.

Get audit-ready for $300.

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The part I want you to actually remember

Starter isn't the cheap seat at the adult table. It's the plan for the moment before you know if you need the adult table at all. Use it to find out — write your policies, run the gap analysis, see what a Security-only SOC 2 report actually requires of a company your size — before you commit to a full audit window and everything that comes with it.

When you're ready to run the real thing, Essentials is one click away — and the $300 you paid for Starter is always credited toward your first year, billed annually. Everything you built on Starter carries forward. Nothing gets thrown out.

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Written by Joe, who led SOC 2 at a prior company before founding SimpleAudit — the AI-guided compliance platform built for founders and owners who don't have a CTO hat to wear.