Honest modelling, no vendor maths
Compliance Automation ROI Calculator
Every automation vendor publishes a return on investment number. Those numbers are marketing. This tool uses your own inputs and a deliberately conservative saving band of 25 to 60 percent of current evidence work, because that is where teams who have actually run a full audit cycle tend to land.
Your inputs
Everyone whose access, devices and training end up as audit evidence.
Salary plus payroll cost plus overhead, divided by working hours. Engineers are often $80 to $130.
Screenshots, access reviews, policy chasing, ticket exports, spreadsheet upkeep.
Use the quoted first year price including onboarding, not the list price on the website.
Estimated annual value of time saved
$6,120 to $14,688
Against a subscription of $15,000 a year
Hours saved a year
72 to 173
Out of 288 hours currently spent
Net position in year one
-$8,880 to -$312
Negative across the whole saving band on time value alone
Payback period
12.3 months to 29.4 months
Best case first, worst case second, on time value only
Break even workload
34.6 hours a month
You need to be spending at least this much on evidence today for the subscription to wash its face at the midpoint saving rate
Read this before you take the number to a budget meeting
Time saved is not the same as money saved. If the four hours a week your engineer spends gathering screenshots simply becomes four hours of other work, no cash leaves or enters the business. The saving is real when it prevents a hire, releases contractor spend, or pulls forward revenue that was stuck behind a security review. Say which of those three applies in your case, because a finance leader will ask.
The saving band here tops out at 60 percent for a reason. Platforms automate evidence collection from systems they integrate with. They do not write your policies for you, they do not run your risk assessment, they do not answer the auditor when a control fails, and they add their own maintenance work: fixing broken integrations, triaging false alerts and keeping the personnel list accurate. Teams that expected the advertised eighty or ninety percent are the ones who feel misled a year later.
The costs the model deliberately leaves out
- Onboarding and implementation. Often a separate first year fee, and always a real chunk of internal time in month one and two.
- Multi year lock in. Discounts for two or three year terms look good until your scope changes and the price does not.
- Per employee pricing drift. Growing from 30 to 90 people can move a subscription materially, sometimes mid term.
- Auditor fees. A platform does not replace the audit. Price that separately with the SOC 2 calculator or the ISO 27001 calculator.
If the model comes out negative, that is a legitimate answer, not a broken calculator. Small teams with a single cloud account and one framework in scope regularly complete a first audit on spreadsheets and a shared drive, then buy a platform in year two when continuous monitoring starts to matter. For a like for like view of the products themselves, see Vanta vs Drata, Drata vs Secureframe and Sprinto vs Vanta.