Quick Summary
- 1SOC 2 Type II is now table stakes for selling to mid-market and up
- 2Annual external pen test costs INR 4–12 L depending on scope
- 3SAST/DAST tooling is cheap; the cost is fixing findings, not finding them
- 4Incident response retainers prevent the 3 AM panic of finding a breached prod
Selling SaaS to anyone above the SMB tier in 2026 means a security questionnaire lands in your inbox before the first demo. Founders panic, sign up for half a dozen tools, and still fail the audit. The truth is that real SaaS security has settled into a fairly boring shopping list. This guide breaks down what you actually need to buy, in what order, and what each line should cost.
Stage 1: pre-revenue and seed (under 20 employees)
- Identity: enforce SSO + MFA on every internal system. Google Workspace or Okta. Cost: built-in.
- Endpoint: a managed EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne) on all laptops. ~$8–15/seat/month.
- Secrets: a real vault (1Password Business, Doppler, Vault) for production secrets. No .env files in Slack.
- Backups: daily logical DB backups, weekly restore drill. Not optional.
Stage 2: first enterprise deals (20–80 employees)
- SOC 2 Type II: pick Vanta, Drata, or Secureframe; budget INR 10–18 L for tooling + audit in year one, INR 6–10 L recurring.
- External penetration test: annual, by a reputable firm (NCC, Bishop Fox, NotSoSecure, or a credible India-based shop). INR 4–12 L scoped per app.
- SAST + dependency scanning: Semgrep / GitHub Advanced Security / Snyk. Cheap to run; the work is triaging output.
- Web application firewall: Cloudflare or AWS WAF in front of every public service.
Stage 3: scaling and regulated customers
- ISO 27001 or HIPAA / PCI DSS depending on your market.
- DAST against staging on every release.
- Incident response retainer with a DFIR firm. You do not want to be cold-calling at 3 AM during your first breach.
- Security engineer in-house or a long-term vCISO contract.
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What founders systematically over-buy
Expensive SIEMs before any logs are wired in. Enterprise CSPM tools when the cloud footprint is one AWS account with 20 resources. "AI threat intelligence" platforms with nothing to defend. Build the basics, then layer.
What founders systematically under-buy
Backups with restore drills. Phishing-resistant MFA (hardware keys for admins). Annual pen tests. Security training that is not a 12-minute SCORM video once a year.
Realistic year-one budget
For a 30-person SaaS with one production app: INR 25–40 L all-in for SOC 2 tooling + audit + pen test + EDR + secrets + WAF. Year-two recurring drops to INR 15–25 L. Anyone quoting you a crore for "complete cybersecurity" without a scoped statement of work is selling fear, not security.
Where we help
We bake security into custom software development and cloud solutions engagements: threat modelling during IT consulting, SAST/DAST in CI from day one, IaC scanning, and SOC 2 evidence collection wired into the platform we build. Ready to talk through your security roadmap? contact us.
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