Don't. You are exactly the wrong kind of firm to be pursuing SOC2.

SOC2 is like the corporate GPL of security. It's an infectious secret handshake company security teams swap in lieu of filling out security questionnaires. Nobody savvy takes it seriously.

There will come a time where your business will grow to the point where it makes sense to pay for the secret handshake. The overwhelming most likely scenario in which that happens is a purchase order made contingent on your SOC2 Type I attestation, where the revenue from that purchase order more than pays for the attestation.

Do not ever do a SOC2 speculatively, in the hopes that it will improve your sales prospects. Plenty of successful firms don't have SOC2s. If you're losing sales where SOC2 is a factor, you didn't have those sales to begin with.

• codegeek

  last Friday at 5:10 PM

  I will add a few more things to this:

  - Document your data and security and share that with customers instead. You can say "We don't have SOC2 at the moment but here is all our security and data policy". It works 99% of the time for me.

  - Very few companies truly have policy to reject a vendor if they don't have SOC2. Those are usually large enterprise or companies in sensitive areas such as Finance/Healthcare etc. Even then, SOC2 can be waived if you can demonstrate everything else.

  Disclaimer: I run a bootstrapped SAAS with low 7 figures in ARR and even though we have ISO27001, we don't have SOC2 yet. However, we take our security/data etc very seriously and have tons of documentation and best practices that we always shafre with a customer who asks. Honestly, we will get SOC2 at some point just for the checklist as I don't really care too much about them otherwise.

  • spydum

    last Friday at 7:03 PM

    Fully agree, the only downside is without a SOC2 you will be asked to fill out an insane 200+ questionnaire. Good news is you have all these great LLM tools you can do this work for you, and just check it over.

    • mikeocool

      last Friday at 7:20 PM

      In my industry they still ask for the questionnaire even if you have a SOC2 report!

      • abrookewood

        last Monday at 3:25 AM

        Yeah, I get this even with SOC2 Type 2 & ISO 27001 ... the requests never stop.

        • ezekg

          last Monday at 3:32 AM

          Just say no. Serious.

          • abrookewood

            last Monday at 11:55 AM

            That all depends on the balance of power ...

  • speleding

    last Friday at 8:54 PM

    I run a low 7 figures SaaS as well. This is the blurb I answer with when asked about SOC2 (yes, yes, AI generated):

    "While we follow industry best practices that align closely with the requirements of SOC2 and similar frameworks, we have chosen not to pursue formal certification at this time. Maintaining multiple certifications and undergoing recurring audits across the various regions in which we operate would significantly increase our operational costs and, consequently, the price of our service."

  • pseudohadamard

    last Saturday at 4:45 AM

    An extra comment, from someone in an organisation that faced this recently, on dealing with this:

    - Be outside the US. "SOC2 is an AICPA certification that is unavailable in this country".

    Not sure whether that's actually 100% accurate but they stopped asking after this.

  • parliament32

    last Friday at 6:00 PM

    > It works 99% of the time

    I would add the caveat "...as long as you have no competition." If you're in a market where alternatives exist, and they have the certification, you're definitely transparently losing sales.

    From the enterprise side, I can tell you vendor certification takes an order of magnitude more time/money/effort when the vendor says "we don't have cert X but here's a mountain of drivel you can paw through to try to assess risk." And not just once, but every single year during vendor reviews. It's just not worth it unless you're legitimately bringing something irreplaceable to the table -- to the point where even our executives know to google "companyname SOC2" before even engaging in a conversation.

    • codegeek

      last Friday at 8:59 PM

      It depends on your target market. If you only sell to enterprise/large companies, you may need SOC2 sooner than later. If you sell to SMBs or startups, this advice works (I sell in this space mostly).

    • secos

      last Friday at 7:04 PM

      | I would add the caveat "...as long as you have no competition." If you're in a market where alternatives exist, and they have the certification, you're definitely transparently losing sales. I wouldn't say that its definitive, but it creates a big challenge. And they 100% will use it against you.

• ozim

  last Friday at 5:01 PM

  *Plenty of successful firms don't have SOC2s. If you're losing sales where SOC2 is a factor, you didn't have those sales to begin with.*

  We do have ISO27k1 and we had "customer/prospect for more" and they have a person that requires us to be "DORA compliant" it is just an excuse I know because we don't fall under DORA (they might be clueless about how it works that's other explanation). They do fall under DORA so they need to make sure they check their suppliers basically have ISO27k1 and are following what we wrote in ISO27k1 documentation.

  We got away with not having ISO27k1 for years (filling in forms and proving we are doing good to people that care, I did have to go and talk with CISOs so they trust me I care about stuff) but not since 2025 in Europe, I firmly believe if we wouldn't do ISO27k1 last year, people would just stop talking to us based on feedback I got from business people (excluding pure "let's make an excuse" I wrote about above).

  This said - I am not arguing against what tptacek wrote as he is way more experienced than I am, just stating my experience which also is a decade in SaaS. I am working for company that has between 20 and 30 employees so it also makes sense to be ISO27k certified. We deliver b2b to big companies.

• yeutterg

  last Friday at 4:10 PM

  Plus, even when you have SOC2 (+pen test, +ISO 27001), you'll still have to fill out questionnaires!

  • ozim

    last Friday at 4:41 PM

    But it is a bit easier if you can copy/paste from your existing documents than scramble to make up stuff ;)

    • bdangubic

      last Friday at 4:42 PM

      LLMs FTW

• Nelkins

  last Friday at 8:07 PM

  Even though I agree SOC2 in practice is of dubious security value, I do think you can lose out on sales if you don't have it. I recently had to choose among a bevy of headless CRM options for a client, and they were adamant that whatever platform we used _had_ to be SOC2 compliant. This narrowed the field significantly and ultimately we went with Strapi solely because of this requirement. I see this come up all the time.

  Tools like Vanta (and I'm sure others, Drata maybe, I haven't used them) make SOC2 compliance pretty "easy" in the sense that it's often a mechanical process that doesn't require too much thought. At least for me, it usually involves being in a Slack channel with an auditor, and they're advising you on all the things to do (they want you to "win"/pass, although there is no real pass fail), and then you just need to check the boxes in Vanta.

  • tptacek

    last Friday at 8:34 PM

    I have an extended take on things like Drata and Vanta elsewhere in the thread. I think they're great if you know what you're doing, but dangerous if you don't: the expenses they incur are insidious, because they're not the sticker price of the software or the audit, but rather the unnecessary engineering they lead you to do.

• last Friday at 5:07 PM

• AndrewKemendo

  last Friday at 4:42 PM

  +1 and to add to that…this is the correct answer for basically any kind of “enterprise” requirement from a customer as a solo-founder

  Don’t make anything harder on yourself before you have to and then at the point that you have to (like needing an authority to operate certificate for a classified network) you’ll have the resources to be able to get what you need

• homeonthemtn

  last Friday at 6:46 PM

  As someone who had to cobble together a soc2 program - this is mostly true. At a large enough firm, soc2 is useful as a base level of operations integrity which lots of small firms lack.

  If you have not reached that level as a firm, a good and recent pen test does the trick.

• varispeed

  last Friday at 4:36 PM

  > in lieu of filling out security questionnaires.

  Isn't that no longer an issue in AI era?

  • TrueDuality

    last Friday at 5:12 PM

    Do you want to trust your company's legal commitment on the output of modern LLMs?

    • chadgpt3

      last Saturday at 6:46 AM

      "Move fast and break things" applies even more in business than in software. If you get the revenue and don't suffer a legal penalty, you win. I've worked at companies that didn't outright fake their certifications, but definitely didn't care about following them and just did whatever was needed for the customer to pay up. In fact I'd say that's most companies. This is not a compiler you have to pass, it's a game you play with your customers.

• wahnfrieden

  last Friday at 8:14 PM

  Superwhisper got SOC2 around the same month they hired their first employee

  I would guess they did it for due diligence compliance, not to enhance their security practices. It’s a b2b checkbox.

I'm currently at a small startup trying to do ISO 27001. A big issue we run into is that there simply aren't enough people. For example, the processes are built around having one person who writes code, and another person who reviews the written code. That's obviously impossible as a solo dev. You also need an internal auditor, who obviously needs to be separate from the operations team.

If I recall correctly the minimum in a standard setup is 9 roles which cannot overlap. You're going to have a very hard time doing that as a solo entrepreneur, so you'll probably need to find someone who is experienced in making unusual setups like these compliant - which isn't going to be cheap. Even after that there's a pretty decent chance you'll end up needing to hire 3rd-party services in order to be compliant: our "internal" auditor is just some big firm doing it for us.

• maximilianburke

  last Friday at 4:26 PM

  We've been ISO 27k certified for years now. ISO 27001 relies heavily on risk documentation and mitigation; you can get around the separation-of-roles by calling them out as individual risks and making sure the appropriate authority signs off on them (ie: have an email from the CEO saying "I delegate Bob to create policies and sign off on them, and also perform our internal audits. I recognize the risks this creates but due to our size we accept them at this time.")

  • xyzzy123

    last Friday at 9:21 PM

    Right but at n=1 you are writing the policies, reviewing them, signing off on them yourself, raising risks, then ducking out the back and running out again with a fake mustache so you can accept the risks you raised... regarding yourself... lol.

    Audits rely on a _certain_ amount of ceremony and theatre.

    However, since you typically pay for audits / certifications yourself you might find someone who is willing to entertain the charade if you shop around enough. Probably a solo auditing firm :)

• ownagefool

  last Friday at 9:32 AM

  I offered self-hosting to bypass this. It did the trick and I was able to convert the enterprise customers where compliance was a red line.

• frenkel

  last Friday at 2:17 PM

  We are a team of 1 developer and 1 sales/marketing and are fully certified. You can hire an external auditor for the internal audit. We have AI code reviews, so we don’t need an extra developer.

  • _se

    last Friday at 6:49 PM

    Anyone who certified you with AI code reviews is a moron.

    • awesomeusername

      last Friday at 11:47 PM

      Ironic

  • bdangubic

    last Friday at 11:50 PM

    > We have AI code reviews, so we don’t need an extra developer.

    You can streamline this and remove the developer as well and then of course you can streamline this even further and remove the sales/marketing person and just have AI run it all :)

  • Lalabadie

    last Friday at 5:02 PM

    Let me guess: certified by Sprinto?

    • frenkel

      last Friday at 6:43 PM

      No, we are EU based and used a local certifier.

  • teeklp

    last Friday at 4:19 PM

    lol

• DeonPhilip

  last Friday at 2:11 PM

  [flagged]

I am a solo entrepreneur. Don't.

I learned that my business is unable to pass pretty much ANY certification or corporate IT security audit. Many of the questions simply do not apply to my business ("do you have documented procedures for revoking employee access") and the default answer is NO. Get even a single NO and you're done.

I gave up and these days actively discourage enterprises from even trying to sign up — these kinds of discussions can take a lot of your time and the expected value is negative, because sooner or later those kinds of questionnaires will be required (quite often the engineer talking to you doesn't even know this).

SOC2 falls into that category: you are unlikely to pass, and even if you do, enterprise customers will pull out their own questionnaires out of, well, let's just call it their store backrooms, and you will fail those. Waste of time.

• tortilla

  last Friday at 6:50 PM

  Same. For my business, the enterprises that want to use my software wouldn't actually be worth the hassle as their usage is not more than my normal business customers (SMB). Just more work and costs on my end.

  Early on, I had a potential enterprise account (well known online store) that wanted everything that enterprises wanted in addition to multiple meetings (with all the stakeholders) for a $50/month account (my mistake for not getting that information upfront).

  Another time, a large Canadian media company wanted me to agree to an uncapped liability provision. Respectfully turned them down.

  All in all, I lost some prestige business but if I took them on, it wouldn't move my profit levels much.

  • ErrantX

    last Friday at 7:21 PM

    Your getting that interest because it looks like a steal. Ultimately those businesses couldn't care less about $50/m (except to chance it) but they want - or even need - the enterprise terms.

    They will pay $50 for your product... And probably $950 for the terms.

    (Not saying that would have been the right thing for you but my advice to folks who find themselves in this position is always 20x or 40x the price - if that is enough to make it worth your bother, then go for it. Good chance theyll pay)

    • tortilla

      last Friday at 8:21 PM

      My plans start at $50. Top out at $10k a month.

      • ErrantX

        last Friday at 9:07 PM

        Obviously I know nothing about your product, so completely uninformed!

        But as an enterprise buyer $50/m and $10K/m is the same bucket in terms of cost. No one will blink until around 100K, depending on what it is.

        (The point I am making is; as an enterprise buyer I absolutely know how annoying it is for me to turn up and go "this random regulation, we're interpreting it in this highly specific and unique way, and we want it asap". Hence willingness to pay down that inconvenience)

• codegeek

  last Monday at 4:27 PM

  I know a solo founder who got SOC2 certified. He is literally the only person running the product/company and is SOC2 certified. I found that hilarious to be honest. But he is trying to play the "win enterprise deals" game but not sure how that helps when you are literally 1 person.

• ozim

  last Saturday at 4:28 PM

  If you are solo entrepreneur second that - no enterprise will rely on application built by a single person.

  I don't know how people are approached but company I work for - we basically were laughed out of the room when we had 10 employees with our SaaS solution.

  Something like passing 20 employees and 5 years on the market and no one is laughing at us.

• ergocoder

  last Saturday at 7:02 AM

  > do you have documented procedures for revoking employee access

  The answer should be "yes". And here you just drafted one.

  That's the point of going through SOC2. You make policies that you don't have and execute the policies for some amount of time to pass SOC2.

• Nelkins

  last Friday at 8:08 PM

  > Get even a single NO and you're done.

  Why do you think that's true? SOC2 isn't pass/fail, you receive a report on your business. You can have gaping security holes and be SOC2 "certified." It's just that your SOC2 audit will reflect that.

  • tptacek

    last Friday at 8:35 PM

    It won't even be that. You're not going to have any gaps in your Type I if your auditor is at all competent; your Type I documents what you were doing, aspirationally, at the time of your audit.

• koliber

  last Saturday at 5:14 PM

  You can have an offboarding doc even if you don’t have employees. It will apply in the future once/if you do. It will be silly and useless now, but you can check it off as a YES.

I was part of several third party risk management audits from a corporate perspective.

We regularly audited and questioned SMBs (and big corps) with regards to their security posture. We knew that small shops wouldn’t be able to be fully compliant to SOC2 Type 2 or have an ISO27001 certified environment. If it was clear that our business wanted the product, we either tried to help the company with the questionnaire or created a risk report that was then signed by the business. In other words: even if your customer asks you to be compliant, you don’t have to be if they care enough about your product.

If you seem intent on getting things right, that’s a big plus. Most of your competitors don’t even know what SOC 2 is.

• whitefang

  last Friday at 10:05 AM

  Can this also be done for HIPAA and FERPA, or for those compliance requirements is the process the way to go and just filling out the questionnaire would not be sufficient?

  • blochist

    last Friday at 2:03 PM

    SOC2 is, at the end of the day, a voluntary compliance standard. HIPAA and FERPA requirements are federal law. Waiving those requirements would not just mean accepting additional liability, but would normally make your customer ineligible to receive federal funds, which are typically a substantial chunk of revenue.

    • tptacek

      last Friday at 4:03 PM

      Compliance with HIPAA for small firms is generally straightforward and there isn't a standard audit. It's not the same animal as SOC2, which is a CPA standard and is administered by certified auditors.

    • Grimburger

      last Saturday at 8:30 AM

      You have it completely the wrong way around.

      HIPAA is self-certifying, SOC2 isn't.

      No way on earth you are getting SOC2 without an auditor.

• sochix

  last Friday at 9:20 AM

  Thank you for your comment!

I’ll spend some more time replying to this next week, so circle back to this comment; I’m someone who regularly helps people get past these audits, meet the criteria customers are trying to assess with these certifications, and vet startups who don’t have these certifications or budget.

Start by pre-filling your own CAIQ v4 with an earnest “we don’t do this” or “we haven’t even thought about this” attempt: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/artifacts/cloud-controls-m...

Then read through it and see what you can address immediately (EDR on your laptop, MFA on your cloud environments, etc), followed by role playing your client; “based on answers to this questionnaire, what would I not accept?”

There will be some items you can’t fix.

You’ll soon find out the majority of customers, including banks, governments, defence contractors, crypto startups — simply do not care. If they want to use your product, they’ll work with you.

It may be single-tenancy, it may require architectural changes, it may mean making it selfhosted with a time-bomb, but you’ll be able to address the requirements of the CISO, compliance monkey or executive.

I’ve yet to meet an industry or individual I can’t convince. Even if the product is a hot mess, half baked and radioactive — we’ll deploy it on a VM running inside of a VDI within the customer’s environment, because slopping together a migration path is _so easy_, and those early, highly regulated clients are worth it.

• p_l

  last Friday at 10:25 AM

  Major problem of entire compliance/auditing industry is not enough asking in companies "what are the actual risks we are dealing with", "what's the goal for given control", "do we have alternative control ensuring that".

  Compounded by cheap shitty auditors that just mark down checkboxes on a worksheet

  • apimade

    last Friday at 8:05 PM

    Agree, see the Delve fiasco. But that’s not their job. Their job is literally checkbox. However some audits are so poorly done, or have auditors with zero real world engineering or cyber experience, they’re actively harmful to a product or customer base.

    Example: insane, complex password policies and password rotation policies. These are still pushed by auditors rather than trying to build a reasonable exception case with the client.

    • p_l

      last Saturday at 9:13 AM

      I was thinking more of audits that do not even allow deviation nor have any understanding what they are asking for each checkbox. So it's hard to even start on anything nuanced.

• tptacek

  last Friday at 3:56 PM

  Please don't do any extra engineering for your wiki project simply because it appears on the Cloud Security Alliance CAIQ worksheet. These worksheets are built by committees where every member has a bunch of idiosyncratic controls and objectives that they slip into the document.

  • apimade

    last Friday at 8:04 PM

    Sometimes good change comes from compliance. More than once I’ve seen major product resource shift to address major cybersecurity gaps, in response to a compliance led audit.

    Compliance is not security, but engineers, especially solo ones tend to have their blinkers on when they’re trying to build something to first work.

• gtech1

  last Friday at 5:48 PM

  Do you genuinely use em-dashes in your regular writing ? I'm just curious because whenever I type I simply press -

  • apetresc

    last Friday at 6:51 PM

    An em-dash is just Alt-(regular-dash) on most well-configured compose key configurations, it's not any harder.

    • Marsymars

      last Friday at 8:30 PM

      This is also the default macOS/iPadOS configuration. (So I use em-dashes when I'm writing an macOS/iPadOS, but not on Windows.)

  • apimade

    last Friday at 8:02 PM

    iPhone.

• sochix

  last Friday at 9:59 AM

  Thank you! That make a lot of sense!

  • apimade

    last Friday at 10:22 AM

    No worries, it’s more about finding what the security and compliance teams care about — and making them comfortable. Compliance doesn’t equal security, I’ve onboarded startups with better security than the SOC2 certified, ISO27K Swiss cheese $B unicorn.

    Hackers don’t target based on certification. It’s generally convenience and motive. Unknown startups who are laying solid foundations won’t show up on anyone’s radar for the first 2 years without some insanely unlucky event (i.e supply chain breach, an early employee doing something really dumb).

Not possible in case your clients are not stupid. Any company with SOC2 and <5 people is a red flag.

You might find auditors that would go along but any reasonable client will check your SOC2 report and quality of your auditors.

SOC2 requires tons of paperwork and management and separation of duties with also mandatory roles in your company - never feasible in a one man show.

• panflute

  last Friday at 9:30 AM

  I've seen a small company do a SOC2 where the "CEO" seems to be the only actual employee..

  Its a lot of paperwork but it is supposed to scale for company size so you could dismiss with a lot of the separation if the CEO accepts risks and perhaps relies on a fair amount of external systems that are already certified and has some contractors for specific tasks etc.

• sochix

  last Friday at 8:11 AM

  So that means that solo-entrepreneurs can't sell apps to big enterprises due to SOC2 limitation? I think that it is not fair

  • jaccola

    last Friday at 8:29 AM

    It’s a disadvantage for sure but not usually a blocker.

    They often have security questionnaires you can complete instead. Or, as part of signing with them, you can promise to get SOC2 by x date (which will hopefully be easier with the funds from an enterprise contract).

    I’d recommend looking online at some example security questionnaires or the types of things soc2 covers and writing an internal security doc for yourself so you know your position on everything and don’t have to scramble when it comes to it.

    • sochix

      last Friday at 8:34 AM

      Thank you for your comment!

  • Freak_NL

    last Friday at 9:09 AM

    You can. It just means that the customer has to do the proper analyses and risk evaluation for their own SOC2 (or ISO 27001 or whatever) certification.

    Just focus on providing a good value application and be frank about what you do, why you can't get certification for something like that, but that you can answer any questions they might have for their own certification process.

    If the potential customer makes 'has SOC2' a requirement, than that is not a customer for you, in the same way that 'has more than 20 employees' rules you out.

  • crote

    last Friday at 9:40 AM

    Like it or not, having a bus factor of 1 is a pretty big risk. You are a giant single-point-of-failure, which means that operations-wise you are a far riskier option to your customers than a significantly larger competitor.

  • tptacek

    last Friday at 4:03 PM

    Big enterprise SOC2 gates are generally not real. In the limit, if you have a real deal with a real economic buyer who is actually sold on your product, you can do a conditional PO on your Type I (your Type I is automatic and can issue in a matter of weeks), but that really feels like more of a 2018 concern at this point; it's been awhile since I talked to anyone who truly had to SOC2 to close a sale.

    It's important to really understand how unserious SOC2 is.

  • pseudohadamard

    last Saturday at 9:31 AM

    As the other respondent says, it's tricky but not impossible. We're a small custom shop, too small to have all the roles required, all of our software is open-source (Github/Codeberg), and we neither store nor process any customer data or PII. Almost every single item that SOC2 and similar are supposed to cover are a bad miss - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utxu7pI8CeU. Not only do most things not apply to us but some are completely nonsensical, such as what physical and IT security measures we apply to keep our code confidential.

    At the moment things look a bit uncertain, we're both going to run into more and more situations like this but also hopefully lawmakers will eventually realise that this stuff just doesn't work for OSS code and orgs.

  • badgersnake

    last Friday at 8:27 AM

    It isn’t fair, but few rackets are.

Avoid it for as long as you can. I worked at a startup that sold to enterprises. We had 6 employees. The CEO / sales was able to work around the SOC2 requirement every time.

• lukaszkorecki

  last Friday at 4:45 PM

  My company had 6 employees, I was the CTO and I can't imagine getting SOC2 certified without using Vanta - that was back in their early access/beta days.

  I had no choice - we had so many security assessments spreadsheets sent by potential customers, that getting SOC2 saved us time in the long run.

  • tptacek

    last Friday at 4:58 PM

    I like the people at Vanta just fine but it really squicks me out to see people doing Vanta because it's the simplest way for them to clear this dumb hurdle --- that implies that they don't understand SOC2 and are just taking Vanta's word for it.

    The problem is, Vanta will ask (suggest? come perilously close to demand?) you do a lot of engineering work that is absolutely not necessary for a SOC2 attestation. Worse still: whatever controls you attest in your SOC2, you're practically locked into. If Vanta has you set up some cloud detection capability, and it turns out as you mature your security organization that it wasn't necessary or even useful, you have a fight on your hands with your Type II auditor about why you stopped doing it.

    • browningstreet

      last Friday at 5:09 PM

      It's all negotiable. I did audits and attestations at a bank, .. everything's negotiable.

      > that implies that they don't understand SOC2

      Good engineering and SOC2 compliance can be on similar but not identical paths. If you want SOC2, you're bending your engineering towards that particular standard. Getting SOC2 compliant because it's time, and you have the customers, is just a step, and not a reflection of whatever good engineering you've done. If you can defend it, you can probably keep some of your variances.

      If you're a solopreneur and you've never been in/near an audit, and you're committed to a vendor like Vanta, I'd recommend hiring a consultant for even a few hours to give you independent coverage of industry norms and a little coaching on sticking points.

      • tptacek

        last Friday at 5:16 PM

        I wrote at length downthread about how much engineering absolutely should not be bending towards SOC2; it's the opposite.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150405

        • icedchai

          last Friday at 11:09 PM

          I've been working with an organization that apparently won't give its developers reasonable access to dev cloud environments "because of SOC2." At least, that is the excuse they tell me.

          Example: "I need access to EC2" isn't enough. I wind up with a role where I can launch instances, but not list them. I have to send several emails, have meetings, follow ups, sending links to AWS docs, etc. to get them to modify a custom IAM role. Then they still can't figure it out, so I am literally telling someone what to copy-and-paste into JSON to fix the issue. I completely understand more control in higher environments, but this crap adds up and costs weeks in lost productivity.

          • tptacek

            last Friday at 11:28 PM

            Oh, absolutely, security and compliance teams have for over a decade been exploiting SOC2 to exert undue control over engineering process.

            • icedchai

              last Saturday at 2:29 AM

              Yep! It took a month of back-and-forth to do what should have taken less than a day in an environment with less friction. I'm totally frustrated by the project at this point.

        • browningstreet

          last Friday at 5:31 PM

          I think we're in quite a bit of agreement.. sometimes the SOC2 review exposes gaps and you need to find a way to close them -- where do you look for critical path on that?

          Also, SOC2 audits are sometimes coupled with more strenuous ones, so in the umbrella of audit season, you may have to demonstrate things, or records of things.

    • lukaszkorecki

      last Friday at 6:32 PM

      In my experience it was as simple as connecting to AWS and tagging resources in Terraform. I got it all done in around 3 weeks. So maybe yes, if somebody doesn’t know about SOC2 then Vanta might be getting in the way but it in my case it literally solved all my problems in a month or so

As others suggested, as a solo entrepreneur, I recommend not entering this process without a real justification. I passed this SOC 2 type for my startup after securing a deal with a big client. SOC 2 is an ongoing process that involves many documents and workflows you will need to implement in your company. If your clients really insist on proof of security compliance, I will try to find a local PT authority to complete a one-time process with them to obtain this kind of report.

• tclancy

  last Friday at 10:04 AM

  PT?

  • pugdogdev

    last Friday at 10:10 AM

    penetration testing

• sochix

  last Friday at 7:51 AM

  Thank you!

It's easier than you might think. Not easy! But I've done it. Have Fortune <100 customers.

As others point out if you don't show your audit you have to affirm that you basically do everything an audit would check. So, do it.

I found Thoropass to be offer a deal that was affordable. You're not too small for them. Check them out.

You can form your processes any way you want! Use AI to construct your policies. Just document what you do.

I spent a probably 5 hours a month the first year. Learning curve and I felt I needed the hand holding from Thoropass... they were generous with time and explanations. Subsequent years, it's all set up, very little until audit time.

Soc-2 Type 2 is a lot of work for solo-ent. and you might have issues meeting some of the compliance with only one employee there won't be checks and balances. We worked with a local firm and their fee was around $15k but there is ongoing verification. Also there is a process you have to follow moving forward that's probably the largest cost.

I'm not sure SOC-2 is even valuable for most smaller apps. As it's compliance is more aligned for financial apps.

It might be more valuable for you to have a security audit instead of SOC-2.

Definitely possible. Start with SOC2-aligned practices and a solid public security page — many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate itself.

• zrobotics

  last Friday at 7:58 AM

  Do they? Every time I've been asked about SOC compliance, it turned out the underlying reason was either insurance or a requirement the customer had from their downstream customer. Neither of those cases would be negotiable, the customer's insurance company only cares about a checkbox that "All vendors are SOC2 compliant and relevant documentation is on file".

  That said, actually being SOC compliant isn't that hard aside from the paperwork aspect. Any competent firm should already be doing all the things required, it's the bare minimum for security. There really shouldn't be any code or process changes needed, if there are you are woefully inadequate from a security standpoint. SOC2 is below the bare minimum for actual security, but it's the standard firms have settled on.

  That said, actually getting a valid SOC2 audit completed is expensive and for a solo dev you can expect at least a month of lost time. I wouldn't pay out-of-pocket for an audit, but if you're in a space where customers are asking it can be a selling point. One strategy would be to negotiate reduced terms with a potential client to use their auditing firm and have them split costs on the audit. This would need to be a very hot sales lead, since it's a big ask, but it might be worth exploring. They likely already have an established relationship with an auditor, and having a referral will cut the price down.

  SOC is just a box ticking exercise and doesn't improve security at all. Or at least it shouldn't, if you don't already meet their requirements you need to either shut down your side hustle or completely revamp your processes. That said, the box-ticking is extremely tedious and involves reams of paperwork. It would be doable as a solo entrepreneur, I worked through the process in a company of 6 employees, but it's not fun or productive.

• swiftcoder

  last Friday at 8:18 AM

  > many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate

  I work on audit compliance for a SOC2 compliant system, and as part of our own audit requirements it is non-negotiable that all of our vendors must themselves be SOC2 compliant.

  I very much doubt anyone who has a SOC2 requirement is not in the same boat with respect to dependencies

• sochix

  last Friday at 7:51 AM

  Thank you! Could you please share some great example of public security page so I can get some inspiration?

  • yread

    last Friday at 8:24 AM

    I was also interested in that and chatgpt came up with these:

    https://iozen.ai/security/

    https://logpulse.io/security/ SOC2 "in progress" haha

    https://get.brightidea.com/security/

    • sochix

      last Friday at 8:35 AM

      Thank you!

I’m normally a “to each his own” guy but have to say I strongly disagree with a lot of these comments.

First of all, you absolutely can do it as a solo entrepreneur - I just completed SOC 2 for the second time - this one being solo. Yes you have to be creative with how you setup checks and balances but it’s not impossible.

Also, SOC 2 Type 2 is an auditor verifying that you’re actually carrying out the processes that you claimed to do in Type 1. So how do you start? You start with Type 1.

I doubt you could get it under $20k but that’s the ballpark. Personally I’d recommend Vanta which will hold your hand through at least half the process. And Vanta support will recommend auditors who typically cut their rate in half because Vanta does so much of the work.

Is it worth it? No way I could answer that for you. Personally I’d say half of SOC 2 is kinda bull crap and half of it is really good healthy processes. It’s definitely a commitment to get through the first audit, but after that it’s more like a 1-2 weeks of work every year.

Any decent auditor will understand you’re new to the process and will coach you through it. Their goal is for you to have a good audit, so they will literally tell you what needs to be done ahead of time.

I feel weird evangelizing it like this cause I’m not like a big fan, but we absolutely have clients that wouldn’t be customers if we didn’t have SOC 2. Yeah, it can be a warm and fuzzy for it groups, but that’s sales, right? My experience is once you have SOC 2 type 2, the IT approval process is far more streamlined.

Not saying you should or shouldn’t, but don’t dismiss it.

Instead of trying to get the actual SOC 2 attestation, do a version of the homework that would get you there; basically writing documentation. The output would be documents describing different procedures or existing infra (disaster recovery, network diagrams etc) and a master spreadsheet with the "soc 2" questions (that you pick) and answers, a "security questionnaire" and this is what you send to companies when they insist.

Note in security-speak the keyword is "mitigation" (you don't have x but you mitigate that by y)

I've been through SOC 2 Type 2 in a company with ~100 people. I think it'd be in some ways simpler as a solopreneur, but still a lot of effort. You won't require as complex controls and you don't need to communicate between different parts of company, but it'll just be yourself doing it all.

On a positive side, you won't have to do 100% of SOC 2 Type 2. The only required part is security if I remember correctly. And a lot of it is best practices that need to be in place anyway. If you are using an established cloud provider a lot of it is in place through their certifications. Some of the controls can be "silly", but generally not hard to put in place. I'd try to figure out what are the minimum nr of controls required and see if that is doable. Pretty sure auditors will give a discount there if the scope is smaller.

It can be somewhat useful for the company if taken seriously, as it can point out weaknesses in processes. Although I agree with other comments that most of it is a checkbox exercise than something that provides any real guarantees to the client demanding it.

I also don't know if getting through it with <20k $ is something that is feasible. Before doing SOC 2 we relied on the clients' security questionnaires instead, so maybe something to always ask about. Usually they were able to make an exception and allow it, although the % started shrinking over time.

Edit: Also, the auditor makes a difference. Pick one that understands small companies. A corporation auditor will get confused with "segregation of duties" if you are the only person in the company.

• tptacek

  last Friday at 4:07 PM

  The only SOC2 anybody does is security and if your auditor tries to convince you that you need the other profiles they're rolling you.

• sochix

  last Friday at 9:21 AM

  Thank you for your comment!

There are plenty of companies and apps that can help you achieve SOC2 or ISO certification by showing your compliance score and telling what needs to be done. They provide templates and assist with setting up processes and policies that will get you to SOC2. This typically takes 4–6 months. I would suggest to go for ISO 42k1 instead of SOC2.

Yes, its very possible.

What's most important for you would just being able to prove to your customers that you do what you say you do.

The core issue isn't SOC 2, it's verifiability. Your customers want to know that what you claim about your security posture is actually true, not just documented.

I've actually been deeply exploring the compliance space lately and a few days ago I built an open-core pre-audit readiness layer. Every finding traces back to the raw AWS API call that produced it, SHA-256 hashed. An auditor or skeptical customer can verify it themselves without taking your word for it.

Its more SOC 2-esque, & its pre-audit readiness not a certification, but it does the job of proving you are trustworthy.

repo if relevant: https://github.com/adog0822/AWS-Evidence-Layer

(I built this, disclosing upfront)

Yes, this is a long journey, but can be done definately, for my first startup reetro. I have done ISO27001 myself and now doing SOC-2 for my second startup Sekorti, which is actually a security and compliance tool and helps with alot of SOC-2 requirements. You need to understand the full scope of SOC-2 requirements, implement those controls and document/collect evidences. It is definately doable, if you approach it in a structured manner.

Most early-stage founders don’t start with full SOC2 immediately. You can begin with strong security practices, transparent documentation, privacy policy, backups, access controls, and third-party audits before going for certification.

• sochix

  last Friday at 7:30 AM

  What kind of documents should I show customers to make them trust me that I follow best security practices? They trust Soc2 Type2, what else could work?

  • zrobotics

    last Friday at 8:04 AM

    If they don't have a strict requirement on SOC2, then either PCI compliance or NSA CISA are more easily done without needing tons of money.

    Edit: PCI would only apply if you are processing customer funds Iirc, it's been a few years since I went through one but thereay be some caveats for that to apply.

  • last Friday at 7:38 AM

My monolith C++ backend passed SOC2 Type 2 without any real efforts from me as a programmer since I was very security cautious when writing code. Nevertheless this whole business is a racket and unless you commit to spending small fortune you will be just fighting windmills no matter whether you are actually compliant. In my case I've developed it for a client so it was their headache. I've just written couple of documents outlining compliance features. but before we got certified we would give clients same documents and that would give us free ride for a while.

• zrobotics

  last Friday at 8:11 AM

  It's 100% a racket. Your code could have been 10x worse and still passed, I doubt the auditors even looked at the code. It's a legal box-checking exercise, there really isn't much of an actual review besides the documentation. But my god is there a lot of documentation and paperwork.

You could look at the process itself and apply the things that sound good to you. It won't help with official certificates but you can start replying back saying you adhere to certain things that are suggested by SOC 2 Type 2.

I can also say that being SOC 2 Type 2 compliant doesn't come even remotely close to demonstrating that you can be trusted. That's not a knock on you or your work ethic, but there's tons of ways for things to go wrong or get leaked while still being SOC 2 Type 2 certificated.

• tptacek

  last Friday at 4:25 PM

  A "SOC2 Type II" is just a repeated Type I audit where they make sure you haven't regressed anything. It doesn't make sense to use the definite article "the" with SOC2: everybody's SOC2 is different.

Don’t. I work on a highly regulated project and it’s the full time job of several people. Only do it if you can hire a team of, like, 4 people AND make a profit

I'm a solo entrepreneur running a b2b saas product I built. I do not have a soc2 certificate (or any certificate). I have never lost any sales (that I know of) because of it.

I've sold to customers that pay $2XX,XXX annually and it was never an issue. I wouldn't worry about it, but be prepared to answer security questionnaires.

Ugh, it's hard. You can outsource as much as possible and minimize your surface area, those are the two approaches I have used, but the auditor expense is the biggest blocker. A few years back you could find auditors for $5-6k, but I think the security/audit service providers have eaten a lot of that market.

You don’t it’s a waste of time and money.

Has no one yet found a way to vibe-code this into a viable self-service solution?

and yes I do understand there is a IRL-auditing authority piece to all of this too.

Perhaps there this is a play here in the market to create a new auditing firm that 99% automates all this for startups? sans fraud certs of course.

• tempaccount5050

  last Friday at 5:46 PM

  You can't automate it as it will require you to make big changes to your infra. It can take a year or more to actually do when you have a full team dedicated to it. Absolute outside the realm of a self service process.

• arjavmehta

  last Saturday at 9:21 AM

  [flagged]

Really appreciate this discussion as I'll be shortly going through this with a 1-2 person company. Does anyone have any experience on how it compares to ISO27001 from the 1-2 person company feasibility standpoint?

• yread

  last Friday at 10:04 AM

  I'm in a similar position. The business continuity requirements are difficult to satisfy. And the amount of paperwork you need to do (depending on your policies of course) can be a major slow down for developing new stuff. So it's best to get your dev heavy stuff done before. I'm just filling in the questionnaires instead for now (and losing some customers who would be too big anyway)

I had the same issues, you do not need full SOC-2 but need to present your security posture in a professional manner. try sekorti dot com,

Wow. Thank you for this thread. As a solo entrepreneur this worries me, since I am putting out agent governance products out there.

You don't. Customers who need it don't buy from solopreneurs. And if they did, they wouldn't expect it.

I doubt it's possible. I'd avoid it as long as you can. It's been a continuous stream of audits for my the company I work for and resulted basically total loss of developer agency.

• sochix

  last Friday at 7:30 AM

  Have the same feeeling....

A lot of early stage founders ran into this. Strong internal processes can already build a lot of trust before full SOC2 Type 2.

There are ways to do it. Send me a message, and I can make an intro to the person we use.

Also offering MFA and ideally SSO really helps them feel more secure.

Agree with tptacek for the speculative case — chasing SOC 2 without a deal on the table is expensive theater.

That said, there's a real inflection point where it flips. We've run SOC 2 for companies where the trust-establishment effort alone was costing 2-3 sales cycles per quarter. At that point the audit pays for itself fast. also, we can get that audit down substantially below 20k...

The signal to watch: if you're losing deals to a competitor who has it, or spending more time on security reviews than closing, that's your major signal.

Also, if your sales cycle becomes "days" or weeks instead of months, thats another major signal. A third-party certification is a stamp of approval that cuts through red tape and BS.

I'm a vCISO and founder at MARFI Systems, currently finishing a doctorate in cybersecurity at GWU and have helped numerous companies from 1-man startups to 500+ unicorns. Happy to jump on a call and help provide some clarify around security and compliance.

Mr. Maguire: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word." Benjamin: "Yes, sir." Mr. Maguire: "Are you listening?" Benjamin: "Yes, I am." Mr. Maguire: "AI."

fire the client.

either they will use the app without soc2 or they will find an alternative.

I went through the process and while it seems it's daunting, it's just a bunch of work and some cash. Once established it's also transformative (or should be) on your ongoing processes and practices. You codify those into a bunch of documents (jesus, that's a lot of documents type of thing) and provide evidence for each; Auditors latch onto those randomly. It's then your job to upkeep documents and evidence which can be helped with tools that have frameworks for those. We use drata and it's really simple and helpful to use.

I don't think you would be able to be compliant as a solo dude though, not easily. A bunch of protocols and practices revolve around governance, handovers, failovers, risk mitigation etc and if you're the only guy there's a hard path ahead. Are you reviewing and approving your own code that goes to production? If things go down and you're the first to call (let's say by automated alerting) and you're not available, who is the next one to call as in what's the documented succession plan or automated remediation.. etc.

Compensatory controls do not strictly require a human, they require mitigation of risk associated with a single human. You'd have to automate a lot of these governances "gates" then. So it would be possible, since evidence you would have to provide is work not org-chart, but it'd be a ton of work.

I went into it thinking I need to answer these 167 documents and provide evidence on an ongoing basis, but it actually also transformed the way we do things. I think for the better. At the end of the day, I also think this can be gamed as probably most certificates, but it's not worth it and transformation you go through makes sense.

• tptacek

  last Friday at 4:13 PM

  I can't say enough how not transformative SOC2 should be on your processes. Near-automatic exception-free attestations should be a byproduct of basic sane corpsec practices. SOC2 should never be leading or informing your security practices.

  For people who don't know much about SOC2, the headline is that all SOC2 does is confirm that you do the things you say you do. There's a short vibes-based catalog of objectives --- things like "change management" and "access control" and "backups" --- but no actual standard on how any of those things are done. The controls you use to meet those objectives could be $50,000/yr enterprise software packages, or they could be a system of post-it notes. Your auditor does not care, so long as the things you say you do, you do consistently.

  What happens all too often is that companies come into this process (usually ill-advisedly; probably as many as half the SOC2-attested firms don't really need to be) without clear objectives and security practices to begin with. They read the SOC2 DRL, reconcile it with what they are and aren't doing in IT already, and end up instituting whatever the "default" controls look like for each objective, which is how you end up with AWS SAAS startups running network intrusion detection in 2026.

  I wrote a post 6 years ago for my clients who were ideating getting SOC2; it's about the (very small and very simple) set of engineering things you need to do to be in a place where you'll get an automatic SOC2 Type I attestation. It has held up very well. You should understand everything in this post well enough to have opinionated takes on everything in a SOC2 DRL, and to be in a position to tell your auditors to GTFO if they ask you to do more.

  https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/03/12/soc2-starting-seven...

  • nrmitchi

    last Friday at 8:26 PM

    I completely agree with the outlook, but from a practical standpoint (in the last couple of years) I have seen the opposite. The SOC2 process is often transformative ("should" vs "is" are not the same thing).

    Especially smaller startups, who grew somewhat quickly, and now "want to get SOC2 because customers want it". In practice this also (often, unfortunately) means "not all employees should have AWS admin creds, we should have some separation between environments, and we should know who has access to what".

    For these companies SOC2 "requirements" can be the business-value line item that can get proper security and access-control patterns in place.

  • Keyframe

    last Friday at 4:29 PM

    Near-automatic exception-free attestations should be a byproduct of basic sane corpsec practices.

    being key here. if you realize it's not all that sane when you start reviewing things, what happened in our case was it allowed us (there were other signals as well) to regroup on our practices and then it was painless.

• sochix

  last Friday at 8:14 AM

  Thank you for your feedback!

delve. s

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