What compliance actually costs
Platform, audit and pentest are three separate line items. Most quotes mix two of them and forget the third.
Your three line items
SOC 2 Type II, under 50 employees. Market ranges, not a quote.
1.GRC platform
€5,000 to €12,000
Evidence collection, policy templates, control monitoring. It cuts the preparation work. It does not cut the audit invoice.
Per year. Real entry level starts around €5,000, the tier one median sits near €20,000, and the observed ceiling is €80,000.
2.Audit or certification
US$15,000 to US$45,000
A CPA firm examines your controls over an observation window and issues the report. Not substitutable: no platform can sign it for you.
Sourced in USD: the public corpus on SOC 2 auditor fees is American. Shown as sourced, not converted.
3.Pentest
€4,000 to €12,000
A third party test of the application and its exposed surface. Required as evidence by most auditors, and the line most budgets discover last.
Per test. Headcount is only a proxy here. What actually moves this number is scope: how many applications, endpoints and roles are in the test.
Total of the billed lines
- €9,000 to €24,000platform plus pentest
- US$15,000 to US$45,000audit
Two totals, not one. SOC 2 auditor fees are sourced in USD and the rest in EUR. Converting them at today's rate would bury where each number came from, so they stay apart.
The audit fee is only 40% to 60% of total program cost. The rest is the platform, the pentest, remediation, and the internal time nobody puts on a quote.
On your segment, the audit costs more than the platform
The floor of the audit line sits above the ceiling of the platform line. Read it as an order of magnitude rather than a converted comparison: the audit figure is sourced in USD, the platform figure in EUR. If you are comparing an auditor's quote against a platform subscription and concluding one is expensive, you are comparing two different objects: one buys an opinion you can hand to a customer, the other buys the work of getting ready for it.
What your deadline allows
A three month observation window is the usual first Type II. The auditor has to be engaged before the window opens, not after it closes, otherwise the evidence collected during the window does not count.
The deadline does not move the numbers on this page. Rush fees exist on both the audit and the pentest side, but no public sourced range documents them, so applying a multiplier would be inventing a figure. What the deadline changes is what is reachable in the window.
Where these numbers come from
Data as of 2026-08-11. Of 15 vendors studied, only 4 publish a price. Everything below is a public market range: published pricing pages, procurement data, and auditor fee surveys. No figure here comes from a partner call or from a private quote.
Search for any vendor plus the word pricing and you mostly get pages written by that vendor's competitors, which inflate the other side's numbers by construction. That is why this page gives ranges by category and never ranks named vendors.
The line most budgets discover last
The pentest line above tends to surface after the platform is bought and the auditor is booked. Fleuret delivers it in hours instead of weeks, from 4,000 euros per test, with a report your auditor can read.