Why Managed Compliance Beats DIY (Vanta vs a Human Team)

Vanta and Drata are excellent products. They automate evidence collection, map controls to frameworks, and give your auditor a clean portal. But they don't do the work for you.

The DIY Compliance Stack

Here's what a typical Series A company assembles when they decide to get SOC 2 on their own:

| Component | Annual Cost | |-----------|-------------| | Vanta or Drata (GRC platform) | $15,000–$50,000 | | Compliance hire (or fractional CISO) | $80,000–$180,000 | | Auditor | $20,000–$40,000 | | Pen-test | $10,000–$25,000 | | Internal engineering time (integrations, fixes) | $20,000–$40,000 | | Total Year 1 | $145,000–$335,000 |

The GRC platform is the smallest line item. The real cost is the human who has to configure it, write policies that actually reflect your business, run access reviews, remediate findings, and manage the auditor relationship.

What "Managed" Actually Means

When we say managed compliance, we mean:

• We write your policies. Not templates — actual policies tailored to your stack, your team, your business processes. You review and approve; we draft.
• We wire the evidence automation. We connect your cloud accounts, identity provider, code repos, and device management to continuous monitoring. You don't touch the GRC platform.
• We run your access reviews. Every quarter, we pull the access lists, flag anomalies, and present you with a "review and approve" checklist. Takes 30 minutes of your time.
• We manage the auditor. We prepare the evidence, handle auditor questions, attend the audit calls, and drive the process to close.
• We remediate drift. When a control drifts (someone disables MFA, a new S3 bucket is public, a new vendor shows up without a BAA), we catch it and fix it — not just alert you.

The Cost Comparison

| | DIY (Vanta + hire) | Managed (FencePencil) | |---|---|---| | Year 1 total | $145K–$335K | $70K–$90K | | Year 2 total | $115K–$270K | $50K–$70K | | Time to SOC 2 Type I | 8–16 weeks | 4–6 weeks | | Your team's time | 200+ hours | 40–60 hours | | Hiring required | Yes (compliance lead) | No |

The math works because we spread the compliance expertise across multiple clients. Your company gets a team of compliance operators for the cost of a fraction of a single hire.

When DIY Makes Sense

To be fair, there are scenarios where DIY is the better choice:

• You're a 500+ person company with a dedicated security team. You have the headcount to run the program internally and the GRC platform becomes a force multiplier for your existing team.
• You need to own every aspect of the compliance program for regulatory reasons (some government contracts require in-house compliance staff).
• You're already compliant and just need a platform to maintain evidence. If the hard work is done, the tool is enough.

For everyone else — especially seed through Series B companies that need to ship compliance to close deals — managed is faster, cheaper, and less distracting.

Try It

Curious what your Year 1 would look like? Use our compliance cost calculator or book a call to compare.