Ask HN: How to be SOC2 Type 2 compliant as a solo-entreprenuer? Is it possible? Do you know success cases w/o spending 20+k $ on auditors? My customers bombards me with question about certification of my app Perfect Wiki, I need help with finding the best way to show them that my app could be trusted. |
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.
either they will use the app without soc2 or they will find an alternative.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
"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."
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you have not reached that level as a firm, a good and recent pen test does the trick.
Isn't that no longer an issue in AI era?
I would guess they did it for due diligence compliance, not to enhance their security practices. It’s a b2b checkbox.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Note in security-speak the keyword is "mitigation" (you don't have x but you mitigate that by y)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Compounded by cheap shitty auditors that just mark down checkboxes on a worksheet
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It's important to really understand how unserious SOC2 is.
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.
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.
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
https://logpulse.io/security/ SOC2 "in progress" haha
HIPAA is self-certifying, SOC2 isn't.
No way on earth you are getting SOC2 without an auditor.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.