GRC platform pricing for SOC 2: what the vendors actually publish.

The received wisdom on GRC pricing is that it is quote-only. It is not. Every vendor below publishes a public dimension table on its AWS Marketplace listing, giving the annual dollar price of each line it bills. Several also offer a private-offer path, and some of the listings carry a "starting price" label. Both things are true at once: there is a public list price, and there is an optional negotiated path.

Vanta is the clearest example of why this matters. Its own pricing page names four tiers and publishes no prices at all. Its AWS Marketplace listing publishes the same tier names with dollar figures attached. A page that cites the pricing page as its source for Vanta prices is citing a document with no prices in it.

The single most expensive mistake in comparing these products is reading the platform line as the price. Four of the seven bill the platform subscription and each compliance framework separately. Secureframe's listing says it outright: the Platform SKU must be purchased in order to purchase First Framework. So the $7,500 Secureframe platform line, on its own, buys zero frameworks and cannot produce a SOC 2 report. It is not an entry price for SOC 2. It is half of one.

The other structure is packaged: Vanta and Scrut publish a single figure with no separate framework line. Scytale sits between, with a platform price that bundles one framework and a separate line for each one after that.

Every line below is a published dimension, named as the listing names it. Where a vendor publishes more dimensions than are relevant to SOC 2, the SOC-2-relevant ones are shown and the listing is linked for the rest.

The figures in this table are our arithmetic, not published prices. Where a vendor bills a platform and a framework separately, AWS publishes the two dimensions and publishes no combined figure. Adding them is a reasonable thing for a buyer to do, and it is still addition we did, so it is labelled as ours wherever it appears.

The one genuine like-for-like pair is Sprinto and Secureframe. Both publish an up-to-100-employee band, and both bill platform plus first framework. At that band, Sprinto's two published lines come to from $9,500 by our arithmetic, against Secureframe's $15,000. The comparison is still not quite symmetrical: Sprinto's framework line is published as "starting at $2,000 each", which makes its figure a floor, and Secureframe's is not a floor. So the gap between them is at most what it appears and possibly less.

At 20 employees and under, the comparison is Vanta's $14,000 Essentials package against Scrut's $15,000, both single published figures with no framework line to add. Sprinto's band covers that headcount too, at a lower published figure.

Drata is the most expensive of the seven on published list prices, and by a wide margin: a $25,000 platform fee for a 100-FTE capacity, plus $7,500 for the framework. Its framework pricing is flat across all nine frameworks it lists, so SOC 2 costs exactly what ISO 27001 or HIPAA costs. That flatness is worth something to a multi-framework buyer and nothing at all to a single-framework one.

They are list prices, and list prices are the start of a conversation. Vanta, Drata and Scytale all publish a private-offer path on the same listing as the figure. Scytale labels its number a starting price and asks for a quote. What a given company actually pays after a negotiation is not published anywhere, by anyone, and no amount of survey data turns that into a fact.

They also cover a single year of a single contract shape. Nothing here tells you about multi-year terms, mid-term headcount growth past the band ceiling, or what happens at renewal. Those are the questions to take to the vendor.

Whether a platform is worth its fee is not a question the price answers. The honest calculation is the internal hours the automation absorbs, multiplied by what those hours cost you, set against the fee you have been quoted. If it is positive the platform earns its place; if negative, the spreadsheet path costs less in cash, though it concentrates the work on whoever is running it.

The hours figure in that tool is this site's assumption and nothing more. Its shape is defensible: automation absorbs more as headcount and framework count rise. Its precision is not, so treat the output as a sense of direction rather than a number to put in a board paper.

Multi-framework programmes are the best fit, and the published prices show why. The evidence collected for SOC 2 is largely the same evidence ISO 27001 and GDPR want to see. A platform collects it once and tests it against each framework, and the marginal published cost of the second framework is small next to the first: $2,100 at Scytale, $7,500 at Drata, and nothing extra at all in Vanta's packaged tiers.

Distributed engineering teams are the second. Past roughly 20 engineers across several time zones, manual evidence collection fails on calendar coordination before it fails on anything else.

Continuous monitoring commitments are the third. Where customers contract for ongoing controls evidence between audit cycles, a platform provides that surface and a spreadsheet does not.

Single framework, small team, controls already documented: the fee usually exceeds the hours it recovers. A spreadsheet and a good auditor wins on cash. The trade-off is concentration risk, and at that size the person concentrated is usually a founder, who is concentrated by default.

A one-off Type 1 to unblock a single customer: the platform contract runs for a year while the SOC 2 work runs for a quarter. The published prices are annual, and none of these listings sells a quarter.

A team growing through a band ceiling mid-contract: most of these figures are banded by headcount. A company that will cross 100 employees during the contract year is not buying the price it is reading.

For the spreadsheet-led path in detail, see the DIY SOC 2 page. For the audit fee, which no platform includes and no firm publishes, see the audit firm fees page. For the readiness work a platform partially replaces, see the readiness cost page.