Testing and defence led by a published security researcher with five CVEs, including a CVSS 9.1 Mirai botnet kill-switch.
All security →SOC 2, ISO, CPCSC, and the Canadian privacy stack, run end to end with an independent auditor.
All frameworks →Original research, free tools, and plain-language guides on security and compliance, from a published security researcher.
Read the blog →PCI DSS v4.0.1 is the payment-card industry security standard that applies to any organization that stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data. Scope is everything: the single biggest driver of PCI cost and pain is how much of your environment is in scope. We scope it tightly, close the gaps, and get you to the right Self-Assessment Questionnaire.
You come out knowing exactly what is in your cardholder data environment, which SAQ you owe, and what to fix, usually with a smaller, cheaper scope than you started with. For most startups, the biggest win is descoping: keeping card data out of your systems so PCI stays manageable.
PCI DSS is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard maintained by the PCI Security Standards Council on behalf of the card brands. Version 4.0.1 is the current release and introduces updated requirements around authentication, monitoring, and customized implementation approaches. Its 51 future-dated requirements became mandatory on 31 March 2025.
It depends on how you accept payments and whether card data ever touches your systems. A fully outsourced e-commerce setup uses a much shorter SAQ than one that handles card data directly. Determining the right SAQ is one of the first things we do in scoping.
Usually, yes. Using a compliant payment processor, tokenization, or a hosted payment page keeps cardholder data out of your environment and dramatically shrinks what you have to assess. Descoping is often the highest-leverage move we make with a client.
It varies heavily by scope, SAQ type, and whether you need a Qualified Security Assessor. See our PCI DSS cost in CAD page for the drivers, or book a call for a scoped estimate. We do not quote a flat price before understanding your environment.
The price above covers the work. It also covers where the work lives, which most buyers are quoted separately as an annual platform subscription.
| 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 | $11,000 off a five-figure quote on one engagement, for a documented readiness position | Nothing. The audit firm prices your readiness, not your tooling |
Pricing in the right column is what compliance automation platforms are publicly reported to charge; none of them publish a number, so treat it as a range rather than a quote. The $11,000 came off the audit firm's own number once the readiness position was documented (the engagement). Where a paid platform is the better buy, and the fuller comparison, is on the Workspace page.
Book a free 30-minute call. We’ll tell you whether it fits, what it costs, and when we can start.
Book a callNot ready to scope this yet? Open a free Workspace and score yourself against the framework first. It is the same register we work from during an engagement, so nothing you do there gets thrown away.
See what the Workspace does →Track record
We are deliberately not a large firm, and 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 across 76 controls with zero exceptions, on a team of 15.
The platform held 99.9% uptime 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.