A fixed-price gap analysis, remediation through to your audit, and upkeep after it. All in a workspace you keep.
All compliance →Led by a published security researcher with five CVEs. One standard report, letters for your buyers, and retests of your fixes.
All security →To the people you sell to, raise from or answer to.
All industries →Original research, free tools, and plain-language guides on security and compliance, from a published security researcher.
Read the blog →PCI DSS is the payment-card industry security standard (v4.0.1 current) that applies to anyone who stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data.
PCI DSS for Canadian startups · PCI DSS cost in CAD · PCI DSS for SaaS (canonical page)
Merchants, SaaS, and fintech that touch payment-card data. Scope and validation depend on your transaction volume and how you handle card data.
The core of what PCI DSS asks you to put in place.
Depends heavily on scope. A Self-Assessment Questionnaire can be quick once controls are in place; a Level 1 Report on Compliance with a QSA is a multi-month engagement, validated annually.
We scope your cardholder-data environment, reduce PCI scope through segmentation and tokenization, implement the v4.0.1 requirements, and prepare you for the right SAQ or a QSA-led Level 1 assessment.
See Security and Compliance, or compare estimated PCI DSS cost in CAD. Based in Toronto and led by a published security researcher, we deliver across Canada and the US.
Reading about a framework only gets you so far. Our free compliance workspace takes you through all 143 requirements of PCI DSS v4.0.1, one at a time, each explained in plain English with what an auditor will want to see, plus somewhere to attach the evidence and a readiness score that moves as you close gaps. No credit card, no trial clock, nothing locked.
The workspace is free and stays free. TrazTech makes money when someone wants help closing the gaps it finds, not from the tool.
The control library, the evidence, the policies and the readiness score all have to live somewhere. That is normally quoted as an annual subscription. Ours is free, and it is the same workspace we run engagements in.
| traztech Workspace | Other GRC platforms | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | $0. Free forever, no card, no paid tier | $7,500 to $50,000 a year, on an annual contract |
| Control library, evidence register, policy templates, risk register, vendor questionnaires, readiness scoring | Included | Included |
| What it costs inside an engagement with us | $0. You need a workspace either way | Unchanged. The subscription sits on top of the fee |
| What it does to your audit quote | A documented readiness position the audit firm can scope and price against | Nothing. The audit firm prices your readiness, not your tooling |
Platform pricing is a publicly reported range, since none of them publish a number. The fuller comparison, including when a paid platform is the better buy, is on the Workspace page.
Anyone that stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data. Your merchant level and validation method depend on annual transaction volume.
Version 4.0.1 is the current standard. v3.2.1 retired in March 2024 and v4.0 retired on 31 December 2024, so v4.0.1 is the only version PCI SSC supports. The 51 future-dated requirements became mandatory on 31 March 2025.
Not always. Lower-volume merchants can validate with a Self-Assessment Questionnaire; Level 1 merchants generally need a Qualified Security Assessor Report on Compliance.
Outsource card handling to compliant processors, tokenize, and segment your cardholder-data environment so fewer systems are in scope.
No. It is a contractual standard set by the payment card brands, enforced through your acquirer and payment processors.
Book a free discovery call. We will tell you whether PCI DSS fits, what it would take, and roughly what it would cost.
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Free PDFs, no card
SOC 2 readiness, ISO 27001 gaps, incident response and vendor security, as PDFs you can print or forward. Free, no card.
From Jacob Masse, principal of traztech: the files by email, then a few short notes over the next month. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Track record
We would rather show you the work than a wall of logos. Here is what is behind the advice.
Five published CVEs. CVE-2024-45163 (CVSS 9.1) is a flaw in the Mirai botnet itself, which gave defenders a way to shut down attacker infrastructure. CVE-2026-42626 takes HP ENVY 5000 printers offline from any unauthenticated device on the same network.
The printer is the one that matters on a compliance page: an asset nobody counts as a computer, on a flat network, downed by a device that never had to log in. Auditors ask how controls fail. We have found out first-hand.
At Humera, a venture-backed US security company, Jacob built the compliance programme in-house from nothing: no report, no policies, no documented controls. It ended in a Type II attestation with zero exceptions.
The platform stayed in production throughout, which is the part most readiness projects get wrong: controls are easy to design and hard to retrofit onto a system people already depend on.
For a Waterloo data centre operator we ran SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 together rather than one after the other, across a production campus, an AI compute platform and a self-hosted collaboration stack. Scoped so further Ontario and Quebec sites enter as they reach production. Findings delivered and remediated.
For an Ontario medtech company putting an AI clinical assistant in front of practitioners, we ran the gap analysis and built the evidence programme behind their SOC 2.