polara labs

The deal needs SOC 2. You have one week.

Start with the free readiness assessment. An afternoon of questions gives you a score out of 100, every gap counted, and your first findings written out. Then fix what it found and hand a complete audit package to an independent partner auditor. Compliance for startups that do not have a compliance team, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 on the same questionnaire and the same evidence trail.

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Made in the USA · Featured at Startup Grind

Two frameworks. SOC 2 and ISO 27001.

Between them they answer almost every blocked enterprise deal. Both run on one questionnaire and one evidence trail, with a published price and an independent firm signing at the end.

SOC 2The report most enterprise buyers ask a software vendor for first.From $2,000Start today
ISO 27001The certificate buyers outside the United States ask for instead of a SOC 2 report.$5,000Early access

Polara Labs is not a CPA firm. SOC 2 examinations are performed by independent licensed U.S. CPA firms. Polara Labs is not a certification body. Certification audits are performed by independent accredited certification bodies.

Which framework do you need?

Built for the teams that move fastest

  • Y Combinator
  • Techstars
  • Antler
  • 500 Global
  • South Park Commons

The SOC 2 pipeline for founders who ship. Independent partner auditor, nothing faked.

Your CEO can do this. Three steps.

Policies are generated from your actual infrastructure, team structure and tools, rather than from a template with your logo swapped in.

Step 1

The free readiness assessment.

Tell us about your stack, your data, and your team. A rules engine, not AI guesswork, maps the answers to SOC 2 controls and flags your gaps. Same inputs, same outputs, every time. You finish on a score out of 100, every gap category counted, and your first findings written out with what closing each one takes.

An afternoon, no prep and no card. Auto-saved so you can resume anytime.

Intake progress: 61%

Step 2

Close gaps on the dashboard.

This is the half you pay for, and it opens at $2,000. Remediation then tells you exactly what to fix and what evidence to upload. Policies are generated from your actual infrastructure, team structure, and tools, and they fail loud if the evidence doesn't back them up.

About five days of focused work, tracked live on the readiness ring.

Readiness56%
CriticalIncident Response

Incident response plan

A documented incident response plan with severity levels, escalation procedures, and communication channels.

Who approved the IR plan?
Key contacts in the IR plan (names/roles)

Step 3

Independent review.

Your package goes to an independent partner auditor, a licensed U.S. CPA firm. No referral fees. The engagement fee is already included in what you paid.

Polara Labs is not a CPA firm; the audit opinion is the CPA firm’s alone.

Ready to Generate

All compliance items are complete.

All policies complete
All evidence uploaded
Onboarding data complete

What your auditor gets.

Custom policy suite

Thirteen SOC 2 policies written from your data, every claim traceable to evidence you uploaded.

Evidence map

Every control mapped to the proof your auditor needs, with timestamps and chain of custody.

Complete audit package

Control matrix, evidence index, policy set, readiness report. Type 2 adds observation tracking.

From $2,000 to start. The audit is included.

Same deliverable, a SOC 2 report an enterprise buyer will accept, for a fraction of what the usual path costs in a first year. Ours is the only one of the three with an audit inside the price rather than on a second invoice. The bigger platforms aren't bad. We're just built for an earlier company with a thinner margin for compliance spend.

See the full mathOur first year against the two usual paths
VendorTime to audit-readyWhat you payFirst-year cost
Polara LabsThis is usSOC 2 Type 1, then Type 2Starting at about a week$2,000 once, then $600 a month.$9,200First Type 2 audit included. Add the Type 1 examination at the $4,000 entry instead.
Automation platformsVanta, Drata, Secureframe, Sprinto3 to 4 weeksA reported average of $19,900 a year. The audit is billed separately by a CPA firm.$19,900Audit not included
ConsultantsTraditional firms and Big 43 to 6 monthsA typical $35,000 prep engagement, then about $15,000 a year to stay current. The audit is billed separately by a CPA firm.$35,000Audit not included

Our whole first year, with the first Type 2 audit already inside it, lands under what either of the other two rows spends before its auditor invoices at all. No consultant overhead, no enterprise sales team, no renewal cliff. The column is the cheaper of our two entries: $2,000 for onboarding plus 12 months of Type 2 at $600, which you can check against the rate in the row rather than take our word for the total. Buy the SOC 2 Type 1 examination and report at the same time and the entry is $4,000 instead of $2,000, making the first year $11,200. You can also pay the first 12 months up front and save $200, a single $7,000 invoice rather than twelve payments; the column quotes the monthly path so the arithmetic stays in plain sight. Your first Type 2 audit and the auditor engagement fee for it are inside our figure either way, while the other two rows bill the audit separately through a CPA firm on top of the figure shown, so our column is if anything conservative. Competitor figures are reported market midpoints. Platform figures are averages of observed contracts across every customer size, from about $7,500 to $60,000 a year, so a very small team would be quoted nearer the bottom of that range. As far as we can tell this is the lowest published all-in price for SOC 2 readiness plus a signed Type 1 report that we could find, as of August 2026. If you find a lower published one, send it to us and we will link it here.

Get audit-ready. Stay audit-ready.

The readiness assessment is free, so you pick an entry knowing your own score and your own gap count. Then Type 2 keeps you audit-ready on a 12-month term that includes your first Type 2 audit.

Start here

One payment, made once. Pick one of the two.

$2,000one time

Platform onboarding on its own, the same platform either way.

  • Thirteen policies drafted from your stack
  • Evidence binder with control mapping
  • Gap analysis with guided remediation
  • Examination stays optional: pick the Type 1 option whenever you want the report

Nothing to renew. Your policies, evidence binder and export stay accessible whether or not you go on to Type 2.

Take the free assessment

Free. No payment and no card. You choose and pay for an entry once your score comes back.

SOC 2 Type 2

Stay audit-ready

$600per month

Performed by an independent partner auditor, a licensed U.S. CPA firm. Named to you before you sign the engagement letter.

On a 12-month term, with your first Type 2 audit inside it. Or pay $7,000 up front for the first year and save $200.

  • Your first SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in the term and starts once your 3-month observation period completes
  • No separate auditor invoice for it, the engagement fee is inside the term
  • Guided monthly evidence check-ins with reminders
  • Drift alerts the moment a control slips, with deviation tracking
  • Evidence replay for recurring controls, traceable to a real source
First year, all in$9,200$2,000 once, plus 12 months of Type 2 at $600.

Audits after the first one

Ask for an audit quote from your dashboard whenever you want another one, and our team negotiates with independent audit firms on your behalf to get you the best price. Each engagement is quoted before it begins.

You pick your entry once at checkout, then subscribe to Type 2 from your dashboard. Polara Labs is not a CPA firm. SOC 2 examinations are performed by independent licensed U.S. CPA firms. Polara Labs is not a certification body. Certification audits are performed by independent accredited certification bodies.

A SOC 2 report or an ISO certificate is a statement of facts, not a badge you buy. If two companies' reports could be swapped without anyone noticing, neither of them is real.
The operating principle at Polara Labs

Independence is architected, not promised.

AICPA professional standards require that auditors stay structurally independent from the entity they examine. When one platform generates policies and also drafts audit conclusions, that independence doesn't exist, and neither does the report. Every architectural decision we made was designed to prevent exactly that. The same rule holds for certification: an accredited certification body issues the certificate, and Polara Labs never sits on both sides of it.

True auditor independence

Independent partner auditors, licensed U.S. CPA firms. They receive your package and conduct their own examination. We never draft conclusions or influence findings. Firm identity is available on request before you sign the engagement letter.

Unique to you policies

Every policy is generated from your actual data. Two Polara Labs customers comparing policy suites would find completely different documents, because they are completely different companies.

Real evidence, verified

Screenshots you took. Configs you exported. Documents you provided. We map evidence to controls, we don't fabricate it. A missing control shows as a gap, not a fiction.

Your data stays yours

No shared spreadsheets. No unsecured links. No bulk exports. Role gated access, audit logged, encrypted in S3 with presigned URLs only you and your auditor can use.

Read the full independence and ethics commitment

Questions founders actually ask.

Scope, pricing, timing and what the auditor does.

The basics
B2B SaaS startups, usually between two and fifty people. Running a cloud product, handling customer data, closing enterprise deals that require SOC 2. If the founder is the one reading this, you're the target. We are not for Fortune 500s with 200 person compliance teams. We are for the founder who just got the security questionnaire and needs to move fast.
Sign up and answer the intake. There is nothing to pay and no card to enter. When you submit it you get a readiness score out of 100, the tier that score lands in, how many of the controls scored are already passing, every gap category with exact counts of what needs remediating and what needs evidence, and two or three of your own findings written out in full with what closing each one takes. It also tells you exactly how many findings are in the rest of your report. The score lives in your account and recomputes whenever you change an answer. What it is not is a document you can download and take elsewhere: the full written gap list and the remediation tooling come with an entry payment, and you can walk through the whole list with us on a call first.
Two decisions, and neither is due before you have your score. Entry is one payment made once, and you pick it at checkout: $2,000 for platform onboarding, or $4,000 for the same onboarding with the SOC 2 Type 1 examination and report included, auditor engagement fee and all. Then Type 2 is $600 a month on a 12-month term, or $7,000 paid up front as one invoice covering the first 12 months. All in, a first year is $9,200 on the onboarding entry and $11,200 on the Type 1 entry. The assessment and the gap analysis it produces are free, and your first SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in the term.
The whole 12 months, on both sides. You are committing to the full term rather than to a month at a time, and across it we are committing to keep you audit-ready: continuous evidence collection, guided monthly check-ins, drift alerts when a control slips, and your first SOC 2 Type 2 audit, which starts on its own once the 3-month observation period completes and carries no separate auditor invoice. Pay it as $600 a month or settle it up front as one $7,000 invoice; the commitment is identical either way and paying up front is the cheaper of the two. The exact terms are in the Terms of Service, and you accept them in writing before the first charge.
Type 2 isn't a one-time thing the way Type 1 is. It's an examination of your controls operating consistently over a window of time, which means we have to actually be watching your controls during that window. A subscription matches that work: continuous evidence collection, monthly check-ins, and deviation tracking. The audit at the end of the window is part of the term rather than a separate purchase, which is the reason the term is a commitment on both sides.
Type 2 runs on a 12-month term, so the term runs its full 12 months and you keep complete access to the end of it, including the first Type 2 audit, which starts on its own once your 3-month observation window closes. After that the Type 2 features pause, meaning the monthly check-ins, deviation tracking and the active observation window, while your issued Type 1 report and any completed Type 2 reports stay accessible forever. Starting a new term picks up where the last one left off.
You get a seven-day grace period. Day zero we email you and show a banner in your dashboard. Day three we send a reminder. If your card is still failing on day seven, Type 2 features pause until you update your payment method. Your Type 1 audit report is never affected. The seven-day window is deterministic on our end regardless of what Stripe's retry schedule is doing in the background.
Because we built Polara Labs for one narrow slice of the market, startups under fifty people, and we don't have the overhead the bigger platforms carry. No enterprise sales team, no SF office, no marketing blitz. Built the pipeline ourselves and cut the fat. Big platforms are optimized for companies that can pay $25K a year without blinking. That isn't you right now, and we don't want it to be us either.
You outgrow us when the tool stops fitting your company, not on any deadline we set. Usually that's around 100 people, or once you pick up a second compliance framework like ISO 27001, or the moment you hire a dedicated GRC lead. At that point Vanta, Drata, or a bigger enterprise GRC is a better fit than us, and we will tell you. Your audit history and policies move with you. We are a launchpad, not a lifer subscription. That is the whole point.
Type 1, Type 2, and the timeline
Type 1 proves your controls are designed correctly at a single point in time. You can get one starting at about a week, and enterprise buyers usually accept it to unlock a deal. Type 2 proves your controls actually worked over an observation period. Polara Labs locks your first Type 2 observation at 3 months, the minimum first-year window under SOC 2, so customers reach their first Type 2 audit on a predictable schedule. The subscription runs continuously during and after that window on a 12-month term, and the audit at the end of the first window is inside it.
There is no published price for it, deliberately. You ask for an audit quote from your dashboard, our team negotiates with independent audit firms on your behalf to get you the best price, and the engagement is quoted before it begins. Publishing a figure would mean pricing an audit firm's time before anyone has looked at your systems, and a number set that way tells you nothing about what your own engagement will run.
Once your Type 1 report is issued, the dashboard offers the Type 2 subscription with either way of paying for the term. Your assessment data, policies, evidence and audit history all carry over, so there is nothing to re-enter. The 3-month observation window starts the day your subscription activates, and your first Type 2 audit begins on its own the day that window closes.
Type 1 goes audit-ready starting at about a week of focused work. Intake takes an afternoon, a few hours of focused work, not days. Evidence upload and remediation depend on how prepared you are, but the platform tells you exactly what is needed and tracks progress live. Once you hit 100 percent, auditor review typically takes a few business days. Type 2 then runs on top, quietly, through its observation window.
Yes. The intake reads like a founder survey in plain English, not a GRC questionnaire. The dashboard tells you what to fix and what to upload in order. If something needs engineering help, it says so plainly. You do not need a compliance manager, a security engineer, or a consultant on retainer to finish a SOC 2 with Polara Labs.
Trust and auditor independence
Yes. We generate the full policy set, control matrix, and evidence checklist that auditors expect, then hand the entire package to an independent partner auditor, a licensed U.S. CPA firm. You implement the controls we outline. The auditor does the examination. We stay aligned until Type 1 is issued and then continue through Type 2.
The industry had a recent high profile scandal where a venture backed compliance platform was caught producing hundreds of SOC 2 reports with identical boilerplate and pre written auditor conclusions. We built the opposite. Our gap analysis is a deterministic rules engine, not AI. Policies are generated from your data and fail loudly rather than fabricating claims. Examinations are performed by independent partner auditors with no referral fees. Every report is unique because every company is different. See the ethics section above for the full architecture.
They are independent partner auditors, licensed U.S. CPA firms. Polara Labs is not a CPA firm and does not issue the opinion. The specific firm on your engagement is disclosed to you on request before you sign the engagement letter, so you can verify their credentials with the state board. If you already work with a CPA firm that meets AICPA independence requirements, we can onboard them.
Your data stays in the pipeline. The AI we use to draft policies processes information to generate output but does not store or train on it. Evidence files are encrypted at rest in S3 with presigned URLs, and only you and your assigned auditor can access them. Each engagement is isolated. No cross customer learning.
Every policy is built from your actual assessment answers and uploaded evidence, not templates with your logo swapped in. The system traces each claim back to your data. If your evidence doesn't support a statement, generation fails rather than guessing. You can edit any policy before it reaches the auditor, and the auditor independently reviews everything before signing. Two layers of human verification on top of the AI output.
Getting started and leaving
Nothing. Really. You don't need existing policies, you don't need a GRC hire, you don't need to know what SOC 2 means. You just need ten minutes to answer questions about your company, your cloud provider, the tools you use, and how you handle customer data. The platform takes it from there and tells you exactly what to do next.
You keep everything. Your audit reports are yours, the policies we generated for you are yours, your evidence is yours. Export the whole package and walk, in the formats the next platform can read. Nothing is held back to make leaving harder, and you do not have to ask us for a copy of your own file.
We generate policies, evidence checklists, and remediation guidance. You stay responsible for implementing controls and owning the audit outcome. Before final documents reach your auditor, it is a good idea to have qualified internal or external reviewers look at them, the same way you would with any compliance output. We never represent our output as a substitute for legal or professional advice.

You got the email.
We built the pipeline.

Take the free readiness assessment and see where you actually stand. An afternoon of questions gives you your readiness score, every gap category counted with exact numbers, and your first findings written out in full. When you are ready to close them it is $2,000 one time to start, or $4,000 with the SOC 2 Type 1 examination by an independent partner auditor included in that price. Type 2 keeps you audit-ready at $600 a month, and your first SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in the term.

Take the free assessment
Free. No payment and no card. Or book a call and we will walk it through with you.
Set up in an afternoon · audit-ready starting at about a week · close the deal this week
polara labs

Polara Labs builds both sides of the audit: the readiness platform startups use to earn a SOC 2 report or an ISO 27001 certificate, and the practice OS audit firms use to run the examination. Every price is published on the page it belongs to.

© 2026 Polara Labs Inc. All rights reserved.Contact: founder@polaralabs.com

Polara Labs is not a CPA firm. SOC 2 examinations are performed by independent licensed U.S. CPA firms in our network; the audit opinion is theirs alone and is not regulated by Polara Labs. We generate custom policies, evidence checklists, and remediation guidance. You remain responsible for implementing controls and owning audit outcomes. Replace placeholders with your actual controls and have final documents reviewed by qualified professionals before your audit.