We got a SOC2 cert in our bootstrapped small saas company. Then we hid the report behind Enterprise subscriptions because it takes too much time, effort and money to obtain and maintain it.
We did not get certified because we wanted it, we did because the enterprise scale customers forced us to. Due to their internal bureaucracy.
I have the same problem at the moment with Supabase. We're a startup trying to get ISO 27001 certified and need to upload Supabase's SOC2 report to Vanta, but we can't because we're on the Pro tier and they don't give access to that, even after emailing them. It's ridiculous.
It is even more ridiculous because it costs them nothing to issue an extra copy of this pdf report. They need to certify anyway because their enterprise customers will demand it.
(I work at/started Vanta. Email support@vanta.com and they should be able to give you guidance and help out. If that doesn't work, email me -- christina at vanta)
In fact I like the change. This allows them to make almost everything free of charge to individual/small companies, but could fund it from revenue of larger organization, who generally don't have problem paying.
I don't mind them requiring a paid tier to get the detailed compliance level reports, but requiring the most uber expensive "call us" plan is probably too much for many smaller companies that might still benefit from easier SOC2 complaince.
And what of small companies that need things like SOC2 reports from vendors?
If you want to work with large companies, being SOC certified makes it easier. Part of that is ensuring your vendors are also compliant with good standards and that's best done with SOC reports.
Getting SOC 2 compliance alone takes ~10k USD apart from vendor reports. Yes they may be small with employee count, but when I said small I just meant someone running something for small set of users for free or close to free. Not someone working with other enterprises.
My point is that even small companies may need SOC reports from their vendors but still not be able to financially support enterprise level plans with every one of them. By being supportive of hiding those reports behind enterprise level contracts you are effectively supporting pricing those companies out and potentially making them unable to work with larger clients.
SOC reports are only needed for SOC compliance and compliance costs 10k USD. It depends on the subscription cost, but if the company could afford the compliance they could afford extra 100 USD/month. No one expects small companies to pay few 1000 dollars per month.
Although few companies have minimum ticket size for enterprise clients and that is a bad thing IMO.
Or worse, "SSO" as an Enterprise feature. You're a 2-3 person startup, you set up GSuite, you want to set things up right, oh, "$Call us" for a tier with SSO. Nope, I guess disparate users for now. Not the worst in the world to be clear, but an entirely arbitrary gate, in my experience.
I have long held that view also, although the post below about the cost of supporting SSO was interesting. Unlike withholding SOC2 reports which cost nothing to incremental to give to your lowest tier, SSO may increase the cost of support. I wonder how it would go offering SSO as an addon to entry level tiers that covers the incremental support cost.
