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 cost varies more than any other framework because validation ranges from a short questionnaire to a full QSA audit. The figures below are planning estimates in CAD.
For what we charge rather than the market range, see our fixed-scope pricing, or every cost breakdown we have written.
Every figure below is a planning estimate that varies by scope. See also PCI DSS for Canadian startups.
Typical ranges in Canadian dollars. These are estimates for planning, not quotes.
| Cost area | Typical range (CAD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Scoping and readiness | $10,000 - $40,000 | Cardholder-data environment scoping, segmentation, and control work. |
| Validation | SAQ (low) to $30,000 - $100,000+ | Self-Assessment Questionnaire for lower volumes; Level 1 QSA Report on Compliance at the top end. |
| Tooling | Varies | Segmentation, vulnerability scanning, and monitoring. |
| Ongoing | Recurring | Quarterly scans and annual re-validation. |
Outsource card handling to compliant processors, tokenize, and segment your network to shrink the cardholder-data environment. Scope reduction is usually the single biggest cost lever in PCI DSS.
traztech offers fixed-scope, productized engagements so the number is predictable. See pricing, or the Security and Compliance service page.
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.
Because validation ranges from a short Self-Assessment Questionnaire to a full Level 1 QSA audit. How much cardholder data touches your systems is the biggest cost lever.
No. Every figure here is a planning estimate in Canadian dollars that varies with scope, company size, and existing maturity. We give you a firm quote after a short scoping call.
Outsource card handling to compliant processors, tokenize, and segment your network to shrink the cardholder-data environment. Scope reduction is usually the single biggest cost lever in PCI DSS.
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.