If you've started budgeting for SOC 2, you've probably noticed the number nobody quotes upfront: the total cost isn't one line item, it's four or five stacked on top of each other. A CPA firm charges for the actual audit. A compliance automation platform (Drata, Vanta, or similar) charges an annual subscription to manage evidence collection. Someone internally — often a founder or a newly hired compliance lead — burns weeks of salaried time closing gaps. And if you don't have a security program yet, you may need consultants or a fractional CISO to build one before an auditor will even schedule fieldwork.
Add it up and a first SOC 2 Type II report commonly lands between $30,000 and $100,000+ in year one, with recurring annual costs of $20,000-$50,000 after that. Where you land in that range depends on company size, scope, how automated your evidence collection is, and whether you're paying for readiness help. Below, we break down each cost driver, where Drata fits into the pricing picture, and how to keep the number down without cutting corners.
How much does a SOC 2 Type I audit cost?
A SOC 2 Type I audit typically costs $10,000 to $30,000 in direct CPA firm fees, and it can be completed in as little as 4-8 weeks once controls are in place. Type I is a point-in-time assessment — the auditor reviews whether your controls are designed appropriately as of a specific date, without testing whether they operated effectively over time. That narrower scope is why it's cheaper and faster than Type II.
Most early-stage companies use Type I as a stepping stone: it produces a report a sales team can show prospects within a month or two of starting the compliance push, while the Type II observation period runs in the background. The catch is that enterprise buyers increasingly ask for Type II by name — a 2023-2024 shift accelerated by high-profile vendor breaches — so Type I alone often just buys time rather than closing deals outright.
How much does a SOC 2 Type II audit cost?
A SOC 2 Type II audit generally runs $20,000 to $60,000 in audit fees alone, and the price climbs with the number of Trust Services Criteria in scope and the length of the observation window. Type II requires the auditor to test control operation over a period — commonly 3, 6, or 12 months — which means more evidence to sample, more walkthroughs, and more auditor hours than Type I.
A company scoping only the Security (Common Criteria) with a 3-month window and under 50 employees might pay closer to $15,000-$25,000. A company adding Availability, Confidentiality, or Processing Integrity, running a 12-month window, and operating across multiple cloud environments can see audit fees exceed $50,000-$70,000, separate from any platform or consulting spend. Firms like A-LIGN, Prescient Assurance, Johanson Group, and Sensiba are common choices in the $20,000-$45,000 band for mid-market companies.
How much does Drata cost, and does that replace the audit fee?
Drata's compliance automation platform is priced separately from the audit itself, and published third-party estimates and reseller quotes place annual subscriptions roughly in the $10,000-$30,000+ range depending on employee count, number of frameworks, and add-ons like vendor risk management or trust center features. Drata does not perform the audit — it automates evidence collection (screenshots, API pulls from AWS/GitHub/Okta, policy tracking) and hands a packaged evidence set to a CPA firm you separately engage and pay.
So a realistic year-one SOC 2 budget using a platform like Drata looks like: $10,000-$30,000 for the platform, plus $20,000-$60,000 for the audit itself, plus internal time (often the largest hidden cost — a compliance owner can spend 10-20 hours a week for 2-3 months during initial rollout). That's before factoring in penetration testing (typically $5,000-$15,000, often required annually for Security-criteria scope) or a vCISO/consultant if you don't have in-house security leadership.
Why is the "internal time" cost so often left out of SOC 2 cost estimates?
Internal engineering and compliance time is left out of most SOC 2 cost estimates because it doesn't show up on an invoice, even though it's frequently the largest single cost. Vendors selling audits or platforms quote the fees they control; they don't quote the 200-400 engineering hours a mid-size SaaS company typically spends remediating gaps — rotating stale IAM keys, writing incident response runbooks, fixing access review cadence, documenting a vendor management process, and chasing down evidence that a platform's API integrations can't pull automatically.
This is where software supply chain gaps specifically become expensive: SOC 2's Common Criteria (CC) series requires evidence of vendor risk management (CC9.2) and change management (CC8.1), which in practice means proving you know what's in your software supply chain — dependencies, build pipelines, third-party packages, SBOM data — and that changes to it are reviewed and tracked. Teams without existing SBOM or dependency visibility often discover this gap only after the auditor asks for it, turning a two-week evidence sprint into a two-month scramble.
Can you get SOC 2 done cheaper than $30,000?
Yes, but it usually means trading platform automation for manual evidence work, and it only makes sense for small, low-complexity environments. Some early-stage startups skip a compliance automation platform entirely, manage evidence in spreadsheets and shared drives, and hire a smaller regional CPA firm charging closer to $10,000-$15,000 for a narrow-scope Type I. That approach can bring total first-year cost under $20,000, but it shifts dozens of hours of manual screenshot-gathering onto whoever owns the audit internally, and it tends to fall apart the moment the company adds a second product line, a new cloud region, or crosses roughly 50-100 employees.
The other lever that genuinely reduces cost is reducing audit scope up front — for example, limiting Trust Services Criteria to just Security rather than adding Availability and Confidentiality by default, and choosing a 3-month rather than 12-month observation window for a first Type II. Both decisions should be made with the auditor before contracts are signed, since expanding scope mid-engagement almost always costs more than scoping correctly from the start.
Is SOC 2 a one-time cost, or does it recur every year?
SOC 2 recurs annually — most customer contracts and vendor security reviews expect a current report, generally no more than 12 months old, which means the Type II cycle repeats every year. Recurring annual costs typically run $20,000-$50,000: a renewed audit fee (often 10-20% lower than the first year since the auditor already has baseline familiarity with your environment), the ongoing platform subscription, and continued internal maintenance of controls like access reviews, vendor assessments, and policy updates.
Companies that treat SOC 2 as a one-time project rather than an ongoing program tend to see costs spike again each renewal, because controls drift between audits — new vendors get added without review, dependencies go unpatched, access isn't recertified on schedule — and the gap has to be re-closed under time pressure before each audit window opens.
How Safeguard Helps
Safeguard focuses on the software supply chain security controls that sit inside SOC 2's Common Criteria but are the hardest to keep evidence-ready between audits: dependency and SBOM visibility, build pipeline integrity, vendor and third-party package risk, and change management tracking across your codebase. Where a general compliance platform tells you a policy exists, Safeguard gives auditors continuous, verifiable evidence that your actual software supply chain — not just your policy documents — meets the control.
That distinction matters for cost. A large share of the "surprise" remediation work that inflates SOC 2 budgets comes from supply chain gaps discovered late: unreviewed third-party dependencies, unpatched CVEs sitting in production, or build systems without traceable provenance. By surfacing and continuously monitoring these signals year-round instead of during a pre-audit scramble, Safeguard shrinks the remediation sprint that typically eats 100+ engineering hours before a Type II observation window opens, and keeps evidence current so renewal audits don't require rebuilding it from scratch. For teams running SOC 2 alongside a compliance automation platform like Drata, Safeguard fills the specific supply chain evidence gap that general-purpose GRC tooling wasn't built to cover — reducing both audit friction and the total first-year cost of getting to a clean report.