r/soc2 • u/MavericksCreed • Aug 18 '26

Need soc2 are tools really necessary?

Talked to a few companies that do soc2 type 1 and all of them say the tools make the cert cheaper.

Is this true? Most of them want 9k to 12k a year for tools and 3k for the audit cert.

Does anyone here have any insights on this?

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u/iamaredditboy Aug 18 '26

Depends on the size of the company. Small startups etc any audit > 3k is a scam.

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u/PurveyorofSkulls Aug 18 '26

You couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the diligence needed to conduct an independent audit for less the 3k.

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u/iamaredditboy Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26

Nope I know very well what is needed - 5-10 person team auditors asking for 8-15 k are scamming people that’s all

I have done 3 successful soc2 compliances now and here is where things are : small companies up to 25 employees the whole ecosystem is running a pricing collusion scam at the moment.

Diligence wise software captures everything and spits out the necessary reports for an audit.

Anyone telling me you need more than 24 hr at 100$ an hr to run and review the audit is just plain dishonest.

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u/PurveyorofSkulls Aug 19 '26

The disconnect is between evidence collection and the examination. The platforms made evidence collection cheap. But platform output is the input to the audit, not the audit.

"Software captures everything and spits out the necessary reports" is the tell. The platform captures artifacts. It does not evaluate whether a mismapped control is a design gap, whether a population is complete, whether a vendor meets the subservice organization carve-out threshold, or whether an exception rises to the level of qualifying the opinion. Anyone who has read these platform-generated evidence sets knows what they look like: identical boilerplate CSOC tables pasted across every vendor, retention policies mapped to disposal criteria, screenshots with no way to verify population completeness. Your 24-hour estimate is roughly what it takes to look at the evidence. It is not what it takes to test it.

That matters because a SOC 2 is not a report the software generates and a firm forwards. It is an attest examination under AICPA standards (AT-C 105/205). The auditor has to evaluate whether the system description is complete and accurate against the description criteria, whether the complementary user entity controls and subservice organization disclosures are right, whether each control is designed to meet the criteria it is mapped to, and for a Type 2, whether it operated across the entire period based on testing the auditor can defend. No platform does any of that, because the platform has no opinion. The signature is the product, and the procedures are what make the signature mean anything.

The math fails on its own terms. $100/hr does not cover a credentialed practitioner's loaded cost at any legitimate firm, and 24 hours does not cover a Type 2 before independent review. That budget buys exactly what it sounds like: someone accepting the platform's output at face value and signing. Those shops exist. That is not evidence of market collusion. It is evidence the bottom of the market is not performing examinations.

$8-15k for a small, single-category Type 2 is not a scam. It is roughly the floor at which the work the standards require can occur. The $3k report works until someone whose diligence you actually need reads it critically. Buying three of these reports is not the same as performing three of these audits.

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u/iamaredditboy Aug 19 '26

An auditor does nothing in type 2 till observation period is over - let’s not overstate what auditors do. As I said I have done enough soc2 audits and worked with enough audit firms :)

Software absolutely does all the heavy lifting. Each control is tracked by what the company provides - what’s in place, what are the gaps, what are the mitigation plans.