Preparing your workspace
Preparing your workspace
Consultants get you audit-ready. SimpleAudit keeps you audit-ready — for 12 months straight, at a fraction of the cost.
| Feature | SimpleAudit | Compliance Consultants |
|---|---|---|
| AI Policy Generation | Templates requiring customization | |
| Conversational AI Interface | ||
| Ongoing Compliance Cadence | ||
| Gap Assessment | ||
| Risk Register | Spreadsheet-based | |
| Vendor Management | Manual process | |
| Access Review Reminders | ||
| Available 24/7 | ||
| Published price |
No platform on this page includes the audit. The CPA firm that signs your SOC 2 report is a separate purchase. Our row uses our audit partner's starting price; for the others, add the fee your auditor quotes.
| Option | Platform, first year | Audit | First-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| SimpleAudit Starter | $480 | Type 1 from $5,000 | from $5,480 |
| Compliance Consultants | Quoted per engagement | + your auditor's fee | Depends on your auditor |
From $40/mo (Starter, billed annually at $480). Essentials is $199/mo billed annually. Our row is the lowest first-year cost: Starter ($480 a year) plus a SOC 2 Type 1 from MJD Advisors, a peer-reviewed, US-based CPA firm, from $5,000. Starter covers the Security criteria only, for one user and one audit preparation. It gets you audit-ready, but the audit tools (audit window tracking, the audit package export, audit documents and auditor fields) are on Essentials, so on Starter you hand your evidence to the auditor yourself. A Type 1 is the option when a prospect needs a report in under about 3 months. Our recommended path is a security-only SOC 2 Type 2 with a 3-month observation window: MJD prices it from $7,500, and with Essentials ($2,388 a year), which runs the audit, the first year starts at $9,888. MJD Advisors is SimpleAudit's audit partner.
Consultants quote per engagement, and the audit fee comes on top of the readiness fee.
Teams choose SimpleAudit over consultants when they want ongoing compliance guidance year-round, not a one-time readiness engagement that leaves them on their own for the hardest part.
You pay for templates, a gap assessment and advice, but the cross-functional coordination and evidence collection are still on you.
Source: Founder experience
Consultants deliver templates and a gap assessment, then move on. They don't maintain your compliance cadence for the 12-month audit period — the part where startups actually fail.
Source: Author experience across multiple SOC 2 cycles
Outsourcing compliance means you can't answer auditor questions, explain management responses to clients, or adapt when infrastructure changes. You'll need to re-hire every year.
Source: Founder experience
The #1 problem consultants don't solve: remembering quarterly access reviews, monthly vulnerability scans, and semi-annual policy reviews for 12 months straight. For seed-stage teams without a dedicated compliance owner, this is the gap that causes findings.
When your auditor asks questions, you'll know the answers. When clients dig into your report, you can speak intelligently. You own the knowledge instead of renting it.
From $40/mo (Starter, billed annually at $480). Essentials is $199/mo billed annually. You don't need to be a CTO — or hire one. The AI is the expert. You're the decision-maker.
A consultant is the right call when the problem is bigger than one SOC 2 report: you are regulated (HIPAA or PCI on top of SOC 2), your architecture spans several regions or clouds, or you need a person in the room for audit kickoff and the auditor's walkthroughs. A good consultant brings judgment from many audits. What a readiness engagement usually does not include is the year that follows: the reviews and records your controls need month after month. That is the part SimpleAudit is built to keep running for seed-stage teams.
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