Managed compliance pricing bundles four line items you’d otherwise buy separately: the GRC platform license, the audit fee, penetration testing, and the labor of operating everything in between. Bought piecemeal, that stack typically lands at $25,000–$60,000+ in year one.
Two levers pull the bundled number below the piecemeal one. Partner pricing on the platform is the first — Agency’s written commitment is the best available price on Vanta or Drata — or Agency matches it or pays you $1,000. The second is that engineering hours are shared across a portfolio instead of sitting idle between audits, which is the structural discount no single hire can match.
Normalize everything to an all-in annual figure: platform plus audit plus testing plus labor. The spread between vendors usually hides in the labor column — “advisory” retainers leave execution with your team, and execution is the expensive part. Ask two questions of any quote: who closes failing controls, and what does year two cost once the urgency is gone? Full scope detail lives on Managed Compliance Services; if you also need the leadership layer priced, vCISO pricing breaks that out separately.
Scope. Some quotes are advice plus templates; others include the platform, the audit, and the operating labor. Strip each one down to what’s actually delivered per month and the spread usually collapses to who does the work.
Less than you’d expect. Controls overlap heavily across SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, CMMC 2.0, ISO 42001, HITRUST, and US data privacy laws, so a well-mapped program reuses most of its evidence — you pay for the delta plus the new audit, not a second program.
