Security audit for startups, without the enterprise invoice.

It usually arrives right before a signature: your first serious customer’s procurement team sends a security questionnaire, and one line reads “Have you performed penetration testing within the last 12 months? Please attach the report.” You have no security hire, no report, and a deal that can’t wait. Traditional firms quote $5,000–$20,000 and want 2–6 weeks of scoping before a single test runs — small-business “floors” at those firms start around $3,500–$4,000.

What the customer actually needs is rarely a specific firm’s letterhead. They need credible evidence that an independent human tested your application, what was found, and what you did about it. That is exactly what our report is: scope, methodology, verified findings with severity and remediation — written to be shared with the enterprise customer who asked. We wrote a full playbook for handling this request.

MVP code ships fast, and the bugs it ships are predictable — not exotic zero-days, but access-control and logic flaws in the features you built under deadline. A human engineer works through them by hand:

• Multi-tenant access control — can tenant A read tenant B’s data? The single most damaging class of SaaS bug, and the first thing we attack.
• IDOR (insecure direct object references) — changing an ID in a URL or API call to reach records that aren’t yours: invoices, documents, user profiles.
• Roles & permissions — member-to-admin escalation, invite and removal flows, whether a downgraded or deleted user keeps access they shouldn’t.
• Authentication & session handling — password-reset logic, token expiry, whether logout actually invalidates sessions, OAuth and SSO misconfigurations.
• API surface — undocumented endpoints, mass assignment, missing rate limits on the routes your frontend never calls but attackers will.
• Business logic — trial abuse, plan-limit bypasses, promo-code stacking, billing-state manipulation.

Notice what those have in common: automated scanners cannot find any of them. A scanner has no idea that user A shouldn’t see invoice B, or that a “member” role shouldn’t reach the billing endpoint — it can only match version numbers and known signatures, and it pads the output with false positives a human has to verify anyway. Here’s the full breakdown of what scanners miss. Sub-$1,500 “pentests” from big-name firms are usually exactly that: a rebranded automated scan.

Let’s be plain, because plenty of vendors aren’t: a security audit is evidence of a security practice, not a SOC 2 certificate. SOC 2 is an attestation issued by a licensed CPA firm after examining your controls — no penetration test, at any price, substitutes for it. Anyone selling “SOC 2 in a box” via a pentest is misleading you.

What an independent audit is: one of the concrete artifacts a SOC 2 program expects. Penetration testing is a control most frameworks include, auditors routinely request the latest report, and the enterprise customers pushing you towards SOC 2 will accept credible testing evidence in the meantime. Doing it early also means you fix the auth and tenancy flaws now, on your schedule — not mid-audit, under observation, at panic prices.

The slowest part of a traditional pentest isn’t the testing — it’s everything before it. Discovery calls, proposals, SOW redlines, NDAs bouncing through legal. We removed all of it:

The flow: checkout, prove you own the domain (email, DNS, file or meta-tag), sign the recorded Authorization to Test, and a human engineer gets to work. The honest caveat, as always: $49 buys a productized small-app scope, not an enterprise engagement. One web application, focused manual testing of its real attack surface. If you’re running a sprawling platform with mobile apps and fifty microservices, we’ll tell you that before taking your money — not after.