Plenty of teams try to handle SOC 2 and security in-house with no security hire, usually a founder or a senior engineer doing it on nights and weekends. Sometimes that works. More often it stalls deals, burns your best engineer, and produces a program nobody really owns. Here is the honest comparison.
We would rather tell you the truth than win a bad-fit client. Here is when the alternative is genuinely the better choice.
If that is you, do it yourself, and our free tools and library can help. The trap is the team that does not have that experience and discovers the real cost halfway through.
| traztech | In-house / DIY | |
|---|---|---|
| Out-of-pocket cost | Roughly $3K to $8K per month | Tool subscriptions, plus the hidden cost of your team's time |
| Real cost | Predictable, scoped, and someone else owns it | Founder and senior-engineer hours pulled off revenue and product |
| Time to value | SOC 2 readiness on a 75-day track | Often stretches for many months around other priorities |
| Who answers the auditor | We sit in the audit and answer the controls | A founder or engineer learning the controls on the fly |
| Depth | Researcher-grade program with offensive testing | Limited by whatever the team already knows |
| When deals stall on security | We handle questionnaires and reviews | Your team drops everything to respond |
Every hour your best engineer spends learning SOC 2 controls is an hour off the roadmap. We take the program so the team keeps shipping.
Enterprise security questionnaires and customer reviews are a common deal blocker. We own the answers, so a security review does not freeze your pipeline.
DIY security usually means nobody truly owns the program and it drifts. With traztech there is a named, accountable operator who keeps it current.
You get a published CVE researcher and offensive testing through Lorikeet Security, not a program built from blog posts and template policies.
You can, and some teams do. The honest question is whether the people who would do it have done it before and have the time. If yes, our free tools and library will help. If it is a founder or engineer learning it from scratch on nights and weekends, the hidden cost in time and stalled deals usually exceeds the fee.
The visible cost is the tool subscription. The hidden cost is founder and senior-engineer time, often hundreds of hours, pulled off revenue and product. Add the deals that stall while a security questionnaire sits unanswered, and DIY is frequently the more expensive path.
It varies widely, but in-house efforts with no prior experience commonly stretch across many months because the work competes with everything else. Our readiness track runs in 75 days because it is someone's actual job, not a side project.
Good, that is not wasted. We pick up where you are, audit what exists, close the gaps, and take ownership from there. You keep the work that is solid and stop carrying the parts that are stalling you.
Yes. We publish free tools, calculators, and a library specifically so early teams can make progress on their own. When the DIY approach starts costing more than it saves, we are here, and we will be honest about where that line is for you.
Two things: the security questionnaire that stalls a six-figure deal because nobody can answer it confidently, and the founder or lead engineer who quietly loses weeks to compliance work. Those are the moments most DIY teams reach out.
Hand the security and compliance program to a published researcher, and stop paying for it in founder and engineer hours.
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