Coverbase

Coverbase tools

The real price of building it yourself

Build vs. buy: TPRM cost calculator

Pick what you need to solve for. We'll estimate the engineering and analyst effort, build timeline, and cost to build versus buy.

~15 months to buildSmall product teamThen you own it

First-year cost to build

$757,000

Engineering build$517,000
Maintenance, year 1$240,000
Build vs. buy over 3 years4.1×
Build
$1M
Buy
$300,000

Build the estimate

Set your rates and scope

Rates

Compare to a platform

What do you need to solve for?

13 of 13 selected
Assessment & due diligence
Evidence & third-party engagement
System of record & workflow
Contracts & obligations
Monitoring & aggregation
Integrations

Capabilities are tagged by who does the work. Selecting a capability that requires engineering also includes the shared platform foundation.

Method. Estimates include the selected capabilities, shared platform foundation, and ongoing maintenance. Set the rates and selections to fit your situation.

What you'd be building

Every capability is a product your team has to own.

Each block has its own build and maintenance cost. The platform foundation is shared across everything that needs engineering—buying Coverbase means someone else owns the whole stack.

Document analysis

$2Kbuild$27K/yrAnalyst
  • A configured LLM workflow for reading SOC 2s and questionnaires
  • A shared place to drop documents and capture the readout

Intake & scoping

$43Kbuild$13K/yrAnalyst + eng
  • Business-wide intake form with routing and business-context capture
  • Research pipeline for financial standing, security posture, and sanctions
  • Inherent-risk questionnaire with confidence and human-review workflows
  • Tiering logic and deduplication against vendors already in the system

Controls scoring engine

$58Kbuild$19K/yrAnalyst + eng
  • Control-set data model with per-control weighting and guidance
  • Evidence-to-control mapping and an evidence-first scoring pipeline
  • A curated control library that stays current as frameworks change
  • Compliant and non-compliant states with rationale capture

Vendor portal

$48Kbuild$14K/yrEngineering
  • External portal with vendor identity, invitations, and sessions
  • Secure uploads, request tracking, and per-vendor data isolation
  • Email invitation and reminder system
  • Access controls and audit logging for every vendor touchpoint

Automated evidence retrieval

$30Kbuild$13K/yrEngineering
  • Headless-browser automation with source-specific scrapers
  • Document parsing and normalization into your evidence model
  • Scheduling, retries, and failure handling for unreliable sources
  • Retrieved-artifact storage with source and date provenance

Evidence library

$26Kbuild$9K/yrEngineering
  • Document storage with versioning, retention, and expiry rules
  • Deduplication and reuse across vendors and controls
  • Search and indexing across stored evidence
  • Document-level access control and audit trails

System of record

$49Kbuild$14K/yrEngineering
  • Relational model spanning vendors, assessments, findings, and contracts
  • Per-vendor profiles for ratings, documents, owners, tags, and activity
  • Activity log and full change history
  • The shared data backbone every other capability relies on

Findings & reassessment

$34Kbuild$11K/yrAnalyst + eng
  • Findings store with owner assignment, status, due dates, and custom fields
  • Follow-up and attestation workflows that track responses
  • Risk-based reassessment scheduling
  • Accept-with-rationale handling and audit records

Contract management

$31Kbuild$8K/yrAnalyst + eng
  • Contract documents stored against each vendor
  • Clause and term extraction for dates, values, and payment terms
  • Structured contract records with exception-review workflows
  • Alerts on renewal and termination dates

Obligations & CUECs

$28Kbuild$8K/yrAnalyst + eng
  • Extraction of CUECs and shared responsibilities from every SOC 2
  • Internal owner assignment and due-date tracking
  • A portal for owners to attest or upload evidence
  • Traceability from each obligation to its vendor and control

Continuous monitoring

$35Kbuild$15K/yrEngineering
  • Connectors for news, government, SEC, RSS, and third-party APIs
  • Custom detector engine with per-detector rules and reviewers
  • Noise-feedback loop to tune signal quality over time
  • Alerting and exposure mapping to affected vendors and services

Aggregation & ERM

$27Kbuild$10K/yrEngineering
  • N-th party and sub-processor graphs with a concentration model
  • Financial-exposure modeling using contract and business-unit data
  • Cross-vendor rollups and geography-of-risk views
  • Board and regulator reporting, templated and exportable

Integrations & APIs

$30Kbuild$7K/yrEngineering
  • Connectors to GRC, ticketing, and procurement systems
  • Import/export APIs and MCP endpoints
  • Authentication, rate limiting, and field mapping per integration
  • Sync and reconciliation logic to keep systems in step

Platform foundation (shared)

Shared

The stack every engineering capability quietly depends on.

$76Kbuild$72K/yr run
Cloud environment, networking, and CI/CD deployment pipeline
Identity, access control, roles, and audit logging
Background jobs, queue processing, and scheduling
LLM API integration, prompt orchestration, and cost controls
Secrets management and encryption in transit and at rest
Monitoring, logging, backups, and disaster recovery
Your own SOC 2 program for the tool itself

Quietly serious about risk.

Buy the outcome, not the backlog.

Coverbase owns the whole stack—so your team runs the risk program instead of running the infrastructure.

Get a Coverbase quote