SOC 2 Compliance Cost in 2026: What You Actually Pay

You’re looking to finalize your SOC 2 budget. But how do you estimate it correctly when wildly different estimates are floating around online? You may also not be sure whether a particular compliance platform’s price includes auditor fees. I’d say it is a fair question.

For starters, you have two bills to deal with: a compliance automation platform charging a subscription for its tool, and a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) firm charging separately for the audit itself. These are two very different markets. That is why the same audit can cost $2,000 or $20,000, depending on the route you take.

I will break these details down for you in this article, help you understand what SOC 2 certification costs for your team size, where the money goes, which line items you need to watch for, what changes in year two, and how to compare two quotes, and more.

Quick note: SOC 2 produces an attestation report from a CPA firm, not a certificate. Although almost everyone calls it a ‘certification’ anyway. Anyone quoting a ‘SOC 2 certification fee’ is referring to a CPA firm’s fees or a compliance platform subscription charge.

How much does SOC 2 compliance cost in 2026?

If your company has under 50 employees, a first SOC 2 Type 2 usually costs under $15,000, covering the platform subscription and the audit fee but not your team’s time. But at 300 employees, the cost may rise to $20,000 to $60,000. These jumps aren’t linear because they can’t be attributed solely to headcount. The platform fee climbs with headcount, but the audit fee climbs because companies that size may engage auditors directly instead of through a platform’s partner network.

Let’s look at three different routes that you can take to get to the same report, and the table prices for all three.

• With a platform: You pay for compliance automation software and use its audit partner network to find your audit.
• Do-It-Yourself (DIY): No compliance platform involved; instead, your team does the evidence work, and you engage a CPA firm directly at higher rates.
• Consultant-led: No compliance platform here either. A consultant does the preparation for $10,000 or more, and you engage a CPA firm directly.

Employees	Platform subscription	Audit fee (via platform’s network)	Total with a platform	Total (DIY approach)	Total, consultant-led
1 – 10	$4,000 – $8,000	$2,000 – $3,000	$6,000 – $11,000	$5,000 – $15,000	$15,000 – $25,000
11 – 50	$5,000 – $12,000	$2,000 – $3,000	$7,000 – $15,000	$5,000 – $15,000	$15,000 – $25,000
51 – 200	$8,000 – $18,000	$2,000 – $5,000	$10,000 – $23,000	$5,000 – $15,000	$15,000 – $25,000
201 – 500	$15,000 – $30,000	$5,000 – $30,000	$20,000 – $60,000	$5,000 – $30,000	$15,000 – $40,000
500+	Quoted individually	$15,000+	No useful public band	$15,000+	$25,000+

Note: These are estimated ranges across Sprinto and other compliance platforms, based on published pricing, quotes from our audit partner network, conversations with auditors, and what buyers have told us they paid elsewhere, through 2026. They cover invoiced costs only, not your team’s time.

None of these numbers account for your team’s time, which is often the biggest factor when planning your budget. The figures shown are all payments to outside vendors. DIY might look like the lowest-cost option, but that’s only because your team’s hours aren’t reflected on an invoice. 

With a consultant, you’re paying for the same kind of work, just with an explicit price tag. Consultants can help set up policies, build your control matrix, assign owners and review dates, and complete the risk assessment in year one, with much of that work carrying into year two. But unless you keep the consultant on retainer, you won’t have anyone to maintain that ongoing process.

Now the dollar figures here are indicative and rounded on purpose. No vendor will publish a price list you can hold them to, and every quote moves on scope, contract term, and when in the quarter you ask. The audit fees column assumes you hire a CPA firm through a compliance platform’s audit partner network, which makes the engagement cheaper. Going directly to a US-based CPA firm might add several thousand dollars to the same report.

The bands are applicable outside the United States too. Your country moves the total less than moving up one headcount band does, because the platform is priced in USD everywhere and the audit fee tracks the firm’s tier rather than your address.

Here’s what to adjust:

If you are based in	Adjust the table above by	Why
United States	Nothing. These are US-market prices	Your buyers are also the likeliest to ask for an audit firm they recognize by name
India	Audit fee from about $2,000 through a partner network, plus Goods and Services Tax (GST) on the platform fee	Local firms sit at the lower end. A firm with a US presence runs roughly a third more, and US buyers sometimes ask for one
United Kingdom and EU	Nothing on the fee. Budget for currency movement on a USD contract	Audit fees carry no documented regional premium. ISO 27001 is usually the first certification your buyers ask for, and GDPR exposure can push you toward the Privacy criteria
Australia and New Zealand	Nothing on the fee. Budget for currency movement	Data residency is a hosting choice made at setup, not a price

No published dataset breaks SOC 2 fees down by country, so treat any country-specific figure you see elsewhere as a vendor estimate, not a measurement.

What does SOC 2 certification cost for a 40-person SaaS company?

Between $9,000 and $13,000 in year one, invoiced. That is a first Type 2, three Trust Services Criteria, an auditor from the platform’s partner network, on a single-year contract:

• Compliance platform: $6,000 – $8,000
• Audit fee, paid to the CPA firm: $2,000 – $2,500
• Penetration test, requested by their largest customer: $1,000 – $2,500
• Total year-one invoiced cost: $9,000 – $13,000
• From signing the platform contract to holding the report: four to six months, assuming your controls are nearly ready when you sign. If you choose a six-month observation window instead of 90 days, the timeline stretches to seven to nine months, though the price stays the same.

Engage a US CPA firm directly instead of using the partner network, and the audit fee rises to $5,000-$15,000. You will still have to pay for the compliance platform, so the total becomes $12,000 to $25,500, with more of the evidence work falling to your team.

A multi-year contract with the platform may bring the year one cost down further. Ask what the discount is; it is usually the largest single concession on the table.

This breakdown changes as you grow. At 40 people, the platform makes up most of the bill. Past a few hundred, enterprise buyers start asking for an auditor whose name they recognize, which moves you to direct pricing and can push the audit fee to roughly half the total. So below 50 people, you negotiate hardest on the platform contract; above a few hundred, you negotiate hardest on the audit.

Why are published SOC 2 cost figures so much higher?

If you asked an AI assistant before landing here, you were probably told $15,000 to $40,000, and that the CPA firm alone would charge $20,000 or more. If you check estimates from Linford & Company, a CPA firm that performs SOC audits, they put the range at $20,000 to $150,000 with a median near $30,000, and say Big Four fees start in the low six figures (updated 4 February 2026). Note what that figure covers: the audit fee alone. Linford is explicit that a company’s own internal costs often exceed it.

Those ranges are real. But those figures also cover a 300-plus-employee company, often running multiple frameworks, audited directly by a mid-tier or Big Four firm. If you have 40 people and you engage a CPA firm through a platform’s audit partner network, your numbers would be much lower.

Why do SOC 2 quotes vary so much?

Because two separate companies bill you, and because the audit market is very different. A compliance platform charges an annual subscription. An independent CPA firm charges a separate audit fee, paid directly to them. A vendor quote that looks half the price of another usually excludes the audit fee.

Line item	Who charges it	Typical range	Optional?
Compliance automation platform	Software vendor	Annual subscription, scales with headcount	No, if you are automating
Audit cost, through a platform’s partner network	CPA firm, introduced by your platform	Low thousands	No
Audit cost, direct with a smaller US CPA firm	CPA firm you engage yourself	$5,000 – $15,000	No
Audit cost, direct with a large or traditional firm	CPA firm you engage yourself	$15,000 – $80,000	No, but rarely appropriate under 500 people
Consultant to find your control gaps and help close them	Independent consultant, or a CPA firm that will not be your auditor	$10,000+	Yes
Penetration test	Security vendor	$1,000 – $2,500	Not required for SOC 2, but buyers and auditors both expect one
Security tooling: device management, scanners, password manager	Various	Priced per person per month, per tool	Depends what you already run
Legal review of contracts and policies	Counsel	Varies	Yes

Why does the same SOC 2 audit cost three different prices?

Volume, familiarity, and overhead, in that order. The three audit rows above are why two companies can be quoted for an identical report and land thousands of dollars apart.

Through a platform’s partner network, a Type 2 for a company under 50 people runs in the low thousands. The platform brings the firm steady volume, and the auditor already knows the system your evidence sits in, so scoping and fieldwork take less time.

Direct with a smaller US firm, you pay $5,000 to $15,000. No volume relationship, no familiarity with your evidence pipeline, and the firm scopes your environment from scratch. What you buy is a named engagement partner and a firm your customer can look up.

Direct with a large or traditional firm, $15,000 to $80,000. Linford is candid about where that money goes: for many larger firms, overhead is the biggest expense or a close second, covering marketing, offices, sponsorships and pensions. You are paying for a name your buyer’s security team already trusts.

All three produce a report that satisfies the same standard. What differs is the fee, the effort your team must provide, and how much recognition the firm’s name carries in a procurement review.

What do auditors charge for a SOC 2 audit, and what drives the cost?

Auditors describe the same split from their side of the table, and they’re not neutral about it. Beau Butaud of Render Compliance told the Core Business Solutions podcast that smaller firms charge $5,000 to $15,000, while larger traditional firms charge $15,000 to $80,000. He says he has seen engagements priced anywhere from $1,000 to $500,000. According to him, cheaper, less painful firms that partner heavily with compliance platforms carry less weight, especially in the eyes of enterprise buyers you are trying to strike a deal with.

Linford, cited above, puts a sharper version in writing. It advises caution when a compliance vendor’s partner firm quotes far below other bids, and describes recent cases where the price proved too good to be true, including one firm issuing the same form report to every client with only the names changed.

Both firms sell the expensive tier, and compliance platforms have a partner network, so nobody here is disinterested. The criticism holds anyway, and it has one specific answer: ask for the firm’s AICPA peer review report before you sign. A peer review is the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ program under which another firm independently examines a firm’s audit work. A firm holding a current one has had the exact thing Butaud and Linford describe checked by someone with no stake in the outcome. Our guide to choosing a SOC 2 auditor
covers what else to ask.

What does a SOC 2 readiness assessment cover?

Two different jobs, usually sold as one line item, which is why nobody can price it. The first is diagnostic: someone reviews what you have against the criteria and lists what is missing. The second is closing those gaps, which means writing policies, setting up access reviews, and getting evidence into a shape an auditor accepts.

Vendors tend to bundle both under ‘readiness assessment’, so you will need to find out which one a quote covers and decide based on what is relevant to you. So ask vendors plainly whether the audit fee sits inside or outside their number, and which of the three routes above their figure describes. This is the most common source of confusion in SOC 2 budgeting, and the answer can move the total by thousands.

Do note that the firm that helps you close your gaps usually cannot be the firm that audits you. Auditors have to stay independent of the work they examine, so hiring a CPA firm to build your controls means paying a different one to audit them.

Does SOC 2 Type 1 or Type 2 cost more?

Type 2 costs more, and it is the one enterprise buyers ask for. This SOC 2 Type 1-Type 2 choice tends to affect the audit fee more, as the compliance platform remains largely the same.  A Type 1 is roughly half the price, but bundling the two costs more than going straight to Type 2.

Why half? Because a Type 1 auditor checks how your controls are designed at a single moment, while a Type 2 auditor watches them run for months. The catch is that the two are separate engagements. Do a Type 1 now and a Type 2 later and you pay for both, which comes to about one and a half times the price of going straight to Type 2.

	Type 1	Type 2
What the auditor tests	Control design at a single point in time	Control effectiveness across a period
Observation window	None, there is no period to observe	Three months is the shortest used in practice, twelve the norm
Audit fee, partner network	Roughly half a Type 2	$2,000 – $5,000 at the headcounts in the table above
Time to report	4 to 8 weeks	4 to 6 months on a 90-day window; add the extra months if you choose longer
Best for	An investor deadline, or proof you have started	Any enterprise buyer, who will almost always ask for Type 2

Whether you pay that full premium depends on the firm. Some halve the Type 1 fee when you bundle the pair, some discount the bundle, some quote a flat price for both, and some charge full freight for each. Ask for the bundled price and the separate prices before you decide.

Should you do Type 1 first, or go straight to Type 2?

If an enterprise customer is the reason you are doing this, go straight to Type 2. Type 1 may not be sufficient for most procurement teams, and you pay a second audit fee to get Type 2. The exception is a hard external deadline, like a funding round or a deal closing next month, where a Type 1 is the only artifact you can produce in time.

How long should the Type 2 observation window be? 

You choose it, and there is no mandated minimum. The AICPA does not specify a shortest allowable period, though three months is the shortest anyone uses in practice and twelve is the working ceiling. Compliance platforms often suggest 90 days for first-timers because a deal is waiting, but auditors typically prefer longer periods, more like 6 or 12 months.

A longer window means more exposure. Pick twelve months in year one, and the auditor tests months in which your controls were not yet running, and each failure appears in the report by name. Six months of clean operation reads better to a security team than twelve months containing three bad ones, and it costs less than remediating a documented exception.

What pushes your SOC 2 cost up or down?

Your audit route is the biggest single cost lever: the same company at the same scope pays low thousands through a partner network and five figures direct with a large firm. After that, headcount and the number of Trust Services Criteria do most of the work.

Contract term is the one teams overlook. A multi-year commitment lowers the platform rate you pay in year one, before any other negotiation starts.

Driver	Pushes cost up	Pulls cost down
Trust Services Criteria in scope	All five	Security only, or three
Headcount in audit scope	Anyone who acknowledges a policy or runs a managed device	Only people with access to production, customer data or source code, agreed with the auditor before the quote
System complexity	Multiple clouds, on-prem, several products	One cloud, one product
Current control maturity	Building policies and access reviews from nothing	Existing ISO 27001 or mature controls
Auditor route and tier	Direct with a US firm, or Big 4	A firm in a platform’s partner network holding a current AICPA peer review — explained in the cost-reduction section below
Where your auditor is based	A US or UK firm billing at local rates	A peer-reviewed firm in a lower-cost market
Contract term	Single year	Three years, which front-loads the discount

How many Trust Services Criteria should you scope?

The five criteria are Security, Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity and Privacy. Security is mandatory; the other four are optional, and each widens the control set the auditor tests. Most reports scope three: Security, Availability and Confidentiality.

Among these, you need to be careful when adding Privacy criteria. It is also the largest of the four optional criteria, by a wide margin. Privacy carries 18 individual criteria, grouped into eight sections, P1 through P8. Availability has three, Confidentiality two, and Processing Integrity five: ten between them. Privacy alone is bigger than the other three combined, making it the largest scoping decision of the four.

You can decide whether it applies to you by asking whether you collect personal information from the people it is about, or whether your customer collects it and you hold it for them. If you collect it yourself, you are what auditors call a data controller, and Privacy may belong in your scope. If you hold it for a customer, you are a processor, which is most B2B SaaS, and it almost certainly does not.

Getting this wrong is expensive, quietly. Adding Scope Privacy as a processor means the auditor still works through all 18, marks most of them ‘not applicable’, and bills you for the time. 

Processing Integrity is a smaller version of the same trap. It applies when customers rely on your system to produce complete and accurate output, like payroll, payments, or billing. If your product stores and serves data rather than computing results your customers act on, leave it out.

Review what you have already promised your customers. Read your master services agreement, your security policies, and your terms of use. A SOC 2 report attests that you have controls behind the commitments you have made, so your contracts tell you which criteria are in play. You can also stage it: take Security alone in year one, then add Availability and Confidentiality at renewal.

Another scoping question that catches teams out repeatedly is who counts as an employee. Not your payroll count. It is everyone in scope for the audit: anyone who acknowledges policies, completes security training, runs a managed device, or touches customer data or source code. Contractors and offshore staff usually count. Freelancers who never touch production usually do not. Settle this before accepting a quote, because it sets your pricing band.

Which SOC 2 costs catch businesses out?

The audit fee is rarely the surprise, because it is on the quote. What catches teams out is everything a quote doesn’t list: your team’s time, engineering fixes, security tooling you don’t yet own, and a report that arrives months later than planned. Let’s look at each of the traps in detail.

1. Your team’s time is the biggest cost nobody invoices

The work that takes real time is what no dashboard can do for you: writing down your vendor inventory, assigning roles and reporting lines, classifying which repositories are production, reviewing and approving policies, encrypting storage that was never encrypted. These activities would mostly happen in the first three to four weeks after you start the process.

The audit itself takes leadership time too, and that cost is invisible until you are in it. Andy Wallace, CIO of the AI email assistant Fyxer, describes a previous audit at another company: “I was on a Teams call for three days, and a lot of it was just dead air.” Fyxer now runs its audits on Sprinto and puts preparation at two hours, down from five days.

2. The report arrives months after you expect it

The first Type 2 runs in a fixed sequence: get your controls running, which takes weeks; let the observation window pass, which takes at least three months; then the audit itself, which takes more weeks. That is how a ‘90-day’ report lands four to six months after you sign, and if a customer deal is waiting on the report, the delay is the real cost.

The problem here is that you cannot simply skip ahead. If you ask the auditor to cover months before your controls were running and they test those months anyway, they will have to record each failure in the report. Not a good look on the document you bought to reassure customers. That is a full audit fee spent on a report that lists its own failures. If you already hold a Type 1, starting the window the day after is the one clean shortcut you can take. Speak to your auditor, and figure out the best path ahead for you.

3. Evidence only counts if it is dated inside the window

Work you complete after the window closes does not count, no matter how good it is. The auditor cannot see it. Worse, a control that runs on a quarterly cadence can show green on a dashboard while the evidence behind it sits outside the window. This means your security posture looks healthier than your audit report will. Check the dates on your evidence, not just the status.

4. A cheap penetration test gets paid for twice

No Trust Services Criterion requires a penetration test, but if you run a SaaS application, your auditor will expect one and will read it rather than tick it. They will likely review that report, make sure it’s scoped properly, and then see what you did to fix those findings. A test scoped too narrowly, or one whose findings sit unremediated, becomes reworked during the audit. So the money saved on the cheap version may get spent again.

Doing it manually is what that constraint feels like. Bratish Goswami, co-founder and CTO of ZapScale, ran an audit that way at a previous company: “We spent over a year burrowing through every nook and corner of the business, and it was not a good experience. We lost our sleep in the whole process.” With Sprinto, ZapScale reached Type 1 readiness in four weeks and completed its Type 2 audit five months later,  inside the four-to-six-month band mentioned above.

Do SOC 2 certification costs decrease in year two, and if so, by how much?

Not much in cash, and more in evidence. Renewal for the 40-person company above runs about $8,000 to $10,500 per year for the platform and the annual audit, against $9,000 to $13,000 in year one, so the invoice looks similar. The one-off setup work is gone. In its place, you now need evidence covering a full 12 months rather than 90 days.

Let’s go back to the 40-person company example. Renewing means paying for the platform subscription and the annual audit, which totals about $8,000 to $10,500. If your customers expect an annual penetration test, you’ll want to budget for that as well. Year one cost $9,000 to $13,000, so your invoice won’t look much different the second time around. The big difference is that now you need to have evidence covering a full 12 months, rather than just 90 days like you did in your first year.

Line item	Year one	Renewal
Compliance platform	Full price, or discounted on a multi-year deal	Typically rises at renewal; the amount is set by your contract
Getting controls in place the first time	A one-off cost, whether you do it in-house or pay a consultant	Gone
Audit fee	One audit, or two if you sequence Type 1 then Type 2	One audit every year
Observation window	3 to 12 months, your choice	12 months
Evidence work	Concentrated in setup	Continuous across the year

Compliance automation is what makes the 12-month version survivable. Evidence collected continuously across the year costs you attention rather than a quarter, and the per-year figure stops climbing with your headcount the way manual evidence work does.

The 12-month window changes your work significantly. A 90-day evidence set is a sprint; a 12-month set is an operating rhythm, and it changes what maintaining compliance costs you in attention even when the invoice looks similar.

Year two also cannot reuse year one’s paperwork. Auditors will not accept evidence from outside the period under review, so a 12-month window means twelve fresh months. Gathering it takes weeks, not days. That is the real renewal cost, and it is why continuous compliance beats an annual scramble.

Two things to remember at renewal. Audit fees drift with the market, so treat any figure quoted more than a year ago as stale. And if your contract is priced in USD but you pay out of another currency, exchange-rate movement can raise what you end up spending without anyone changing the price.

How can you reduce SOC 2 compliance costs?

You have five levers to manage your SOC 2 compliance costs. Your audit route and your criteria count cut the bill most, together worth several thousand dollars in year one. The second lever is not a saving but a check that stops the first from backfiring, and the fifth, framework overlap, saves hours rather than an invoice.

1. Choose your audit route deliberately

Engage a US CPA firm yourself, and a Type 2 for a company under 50 people starts around $5,000, with the names enterprise buyers recognize charging well into five figures. Engage a firm through a platform’s audit partner network and the same report runs in the low thousands. Both routes produce a valid report, so price is the wrong filter on its own, which is why the next lever matters.

2. Check the auditor’s AICPA peer review before you sign

The credential that matters is a current AICPA peer review, meaning another firm has independently examined the firm’s own audit work. This lever saves nothing by itself; it is here because skipping the check is one of the most expensive mistakes available. A report from an unreviewed firm can be turned down by the customer you bought it for. We hear this often in sales conversations: businesses buy budget-tier reports, only to have them rejected by enterprise buyers in succession, leaving them paying for a second audit months later than they needed it, with the deal still open.

One thing to note here is that ‘peer reviewed’ and ‘peer review enrolled’ are not the same thing. Enrolled means the firm signed up for the program; peer reviewed means it has been through one and holds a report. Ask which the firm holds, ask for the report, and ask in writing. 

3. Scope to three criteria, not five

Security is mandatory; the rest are optional. Add Privacy or Processing Integrity only when a customer has asked, because each one widens the audit without widening what you can sell. Ask yourself whether you collect personal data directly and whether customers rely on your system’s outputs; that should tell you whether the customer request reflects a real requirement.

4. Take a multi-year term if you are confident in the vendor

The discount is real and front-loaded into year one, which is the year you are budgeting for. Ask what it is rather than assuming, and weigh it against being locked to a platform you have not used yet.

5. Share controls across frameworks, and line up the audit periods

ISO 27001 and SOC 2 overlap heavily, almost 90%. So evidence you gather for one can serve the other. Two caveats keep this honest. ISO front-loads more work, because you are standing up a management system before anyone tests anything. While some platforms may price a second framework as a full framework rather than as extra work on top, it would still help save your team’s hours.

And those hours are definitely worth saving. Shipsy added ISO 27001 and GDPR to its program, with each extra framework taking only about 33% more effort. With Sprinto, they implemented ISO 27001 within a month after finishing SOC 2.

How do you compare two SOC 2 quotes?

Ask every vendor the same four questions. They surface the differences that make two quotes look incomparable: what is bundled, what is billed separately, and where your own engineering time gets absorbed. They fit in one email and are the fastest way to put two proposals side by side.

1. Is the audit fee included or separate, and which audit route does your figure assume?
   Fees from a platform’s partner network and fees you negotiate directly are not comparable. Ask for the range across their network, and which of those firms hold a current AICPA peer review.
2. Does your timeline mean “audit-ready” or “final report delivered”?
   These are different milestones, often months apart.
3. Who works through evidence and control gaps when they appear?
   Some compliance platforms flag the gap and stop there; the remediation is your engineering time.
4. Are auditor coordination and remediation support included, or charged separately?
   On some platforms this arrives as a separate implementation retainer.

Aside from this, you need to check that the quote covers the whole program: platform subscription, external auditor fee, consultant support, penetration testing, security training and device management, taxes and payment-plan charges, renewal pricing, and add-on frameworks.

If the quote looks too cheap, the audit fee may be excluded, or it may be priced through a partner network. If the quote you are comparing against assumes a direct US firm. Work through the four questions, and confirm the auditor’s peer-review status, before treating a low number as a red flag.

How Sprinto helps you control SOC 2 cost

Sprinto is an Autonomous Trust Platform that offers automation, AI agents, and features that operate within the limits you set: it continuously collects evidence, closes gaps, and prepares audits, so your team makes the decisions and the platform executes the rest.

Here are three ways Sprinto helps you manage costs:

• Direct audit billing: You pay your audit fee directly to the CPA firm; there’s no markup or middleman. You can choose from an audit partner network or bring your own auditor, and if your customer specifies a firm, Sprinto can also help map that firm’s evidence request list onto the platform.
• Included expert support: Implementation support is included with your subscription, so you’ll have an industry expert working with your team from onboarding through your first audit on one framework, with no separate retainer.
• Pre-audit review: Before your evidence goes to the auditor, a Sprinto specialist goes through what you have collected against your auditor’s request list and tells you what is missing. This way, you close the gap on your side rather than have it written up as an exception in the report.

AltiusHub shows what that looks like in practice. Going into its first formal audits, it reached roughly 50% readiness for ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2 within four weeks of deploying Sprinto and assigning control ownership. Two months in, it completed both audits back to back with zero findings, and it now runs the whole program with a team of two.

The cost that gets avoided is usually headcount. Fyxer estimates that maintaining policies, evidence and audit readiness by hand would have meant hiring “three or four” dedicated compliance people.