Get SOC 2 ready through conversation, not integration

SOC 2 is a security and privacy audit framework developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). It evaluates how a company handles customer data across five Trust Services Criteria: Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy. A SOC 2 report is issued by an independent CPA firm after reviewing your policies, controls, and evidence. For SaaS companies and B2B software providers, SOC 2 has become the de facto standard that enterprise buyers require before signing contracts. It signals that your company takes data protection seriously and has the controls to back it up.

Type 1 is a point-in-time report that confirms your security controls exist and are designed correctly. Type 2 covers a full observation period (typically 6–12 months) and verifies those controls were operating effectively throughout. Most enterprise procurement teams require Type 2, but Type 1 can unblock a deal quickly when you need proof of controls today. The right choice depends on your sales cycle: if a prospect needs a report in 30–60 days, start with Type 1 and plan for Type 2 in the next audit window. Both are accepted; Type 2 carries more weight.

A realistic timeline for a first SOC 2 audit is 3–9 months total, split into two stages. Readiness (getting your policies, controls, and evidence in place) typically takes 4–12 weeks depending on your starting point and team size. The observation period for Type 2 is usually 6 months, though some auditors will accept a 3-month period for early-stage companies. Type 1 has no observation period, so you can complete the full audit in 6–10 weeks if you move quickly. Using a compliance platform like SimpleAudit significantly compresses the readiness phase.

For a lean startup (1–25 people) doing a security-only Type 2, budget roughly $21,000–$47,000 all-in for year one with a lean stack — $37,000–$84,000 the traditional way. The buckets: the CPA audit ($5,000–$8,000 with a 3-month observation period and a peer-reviewed boutique firm), a penetration test (agentic tests that satisfy SOC 2 start at $99 through SimpleAudit partners), tabletop exercises for incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity (included in SimpleAudit’s Pro plan), security tooling ($3,000–$12,000/year), a compliance platform, and your team’s time. SimpleAudit ($199/month billed annually) replaces an $8,000–$50,000 GRC platform, a ~$10,000 gap-analysis consultant, and a ~$24,000/year vCISO. Year-two costs fall about 20–35%.

No. The AI assistant asks you plain-English questions about your company — cloud providers, team size, tools you use — and generates everything for you. You review and approve. No jargon, no certifications required.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial (14 days on the Partner plan) with full access to the platform from day one. No credit card required.

Full access to the platform: AI policy builder, risk registry, vendor management, evidence vault, access reviews, and task management. Everything you need to get SOC 2 ready.

It depends on your starting point, but most teams generate their SOC 2 policies in their first session with the AI. The journey readiness tracker shows your progress across all compliance areas, so you always know what’s left.

Yes. The AI generates policies based on SOC 2 best practices, customized to your company’s actual tools and processes. Every policy is fully editable in a rich text editor — you review, modify, and approve before anything goes to your auditor. Version history and approval workflows provide the audit trail auditors expect.

Three key differences: (1) Zero integrations — no weeks of technical setup, (2) AI-native — the AI does the compliance work through conversation, you don’t need to learn a complex dashboard, (3) Built for startups — purpose-built for companies from 1 to 299 people, not enterprise teams managing 40+ frameworks.

SimpleAudit is conversation-first from the ground up. Rather than a dashboard with AI features bolted on, you interact with compliance through natural language. The AI asks questions, learns about your company, generates policies, identifies gaps, and builds your action plan — all through chat. We’re also founded by someone who went through SOC 2 from scratch and built this to solve the exact pain points we experienced.

You’ll still need to hire a CPA firm to conduct your SOC 2 audit — that’s unavoidable regardless of which platform you use. But the audit doesn’t have to break the budget: a lean security-only Type 2 with a 3-month observation period and a peer-reviewed boutique firm runs $5,000–$8,000 (larger firms charge up to $25,000–$36,000). SimpleAudit replaces the expensive compliance platform and consultant fees, not the auditor.

SimpleAudit Essentials is $299/mo or $199/mo billed annually ($2,388/year). Pro is available today ($599/mo, or $399/mo billed annually), Business is coming in 2026 Q3, and a Partner plan ($799/mo billed annually, $9,588/yr, or $959/mo month-to-month) serves MSPs and resellers. Plans include a 7-day free trial (the Partner plan gets 14 days) with no credit card required. We’re dramatically more affordable than enterprise platforms while delivering the same (or better) audit outcomes.

Yes — on the Pro plan ($399/mo billed annually), your AI agents and scripts push evidence straight into the Evidence Vault through SimpleAudit’s MCP connector or REST API. It’s agentless in the other direction: SimpleAudit never connects to your infrastructure, so there are no integrations to wire up and nothing to grant access to. Evidence lands version-controlled, auto-tagged, and mapped to the right SOC 2 controls.

A Pro feature that continuously reconciles three things against each other: your policies, your evidence, and the SOC 2 standard. When they drift apart — say a policy promises quarterly access reviews but the evidence shows none this quarter — SimpleAudit flags the gap and creates the task to close it, so you stay audit-ready between audits instead of scrambling before the next one.

Yes — the Pro plan includes AI-facilitated tabletop exercises for your incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans. Traditionally these are $8,000–$10,000 consultant engagements per exercise; in SimpleAudit you run them as guided sessions, and the evidence auditors expect is captured as you go.