New: The startup CTO's field guide to running security
Read the guide
A quarter to half of the security tools startups need require a vendor conversation. Here's what the buying process actually looks like and how to plan for it.
By Tim Olshansky, Co-Founder, Fencer
Buying security tools as a startup CTO is harder than it should be, and not in the ways you'd expect. The tools themselves aren't the hard part. The hard part is that the sales motion for most security vendors was built for enterprise buyers with procurement teams and dedicated security staff (and you don't have either).
Here's what the market looks like: for a typical startup building out a first security stack, you're probably dealing with seven to ten tool categories. Of those, roughly a quarter to half require a vendor conversation before you can spend a dollar: no self-serve trial, no credit card and go, just a demo request and a waiting game.
The categories that require vendor conversations aren't optional. MDM and EDR tools can't just be purchased from most vendors; you need to talk to someone first. GRC tools are almost universally not self-serve. Pen testing vendors, even the as-a-service variety, still require a demo in 2026. DAST tools are mostly not self-serve either, and at least one major vendor routes you through a reseller, so you can't even buy directly from the company itself.
Observability tools are similar. Some have pushed toward self-serve, but most still require a sales process.
What this looks like in practice: before you've assembled your security stack, you're scheduling demos. Multiple vendors, multiple qualification calls, multiple rounds of "I'll get you pricing after we understand your environment." For a CTO who's also running an engineering team and shipping product, this is a genuine time cost, and it lands before any security work has happened.
Even the tools that let you sign up without a conversation price in ways that make comparison nearly impossible. Some bill per device, some per seat, some per person, and some based on compute footprint or storage.
If you're trying to build an actual budget, you end up with spreadsheets. One column per vendor, one row per growth scenario, trying to normalize across completely different value metrics. That's added overhead, and it hits before you've run a single scan.
Assume you've made it through the sales process: demos done, contracts signed, everything live. The work isn't over.
Each tool produces its own output. Some export to CSV, some have APIs, and some have dashboards that don't connect to anything else. At a previous startup, I'd regularly pull data from different places: a vulnerability scanner here, code quality findings there, configuration issues from a third tool. We'd dump it all into spreadsheets and try to make sense of it together as a team. Figuring out whether a finding in one tool was connected to something in another was often impossible. A significant amount of engineering time went into that collation work before we ever got to the question of what to actually fix.
That's the hidden cost of a fragmented vendor stack: the ongoing work of maintaining the tools after the purchasing is done. Every tool that needs tuning, every false positive you need to filter, every time one breaks and you're debugging it yourself: that's capacity not going toward actual security.
While you're managing vendor conversations to build your stack, you're also fielding security reviews from your own prospects.
SOC 2 used to cut through most of this. The idea was: complete the audit once, point reviewers to your report, and get through most conversations without custom work. That's less true now. Third-party risk management vendors have proliferated, and many of them use LLMs to send automated questionnaires at scale. A lot of these tools won't let you not respond, and you have to work through them regardless of whether you have a SOC 2.
The badge still matters, but it no longer handles the full questionnaire volume automatically. So you're managing vendor conversations on the buy side and security reviews on the sell side, often in the same week.
Planning for the vendor process before you need the tools is probably the single most useful thing you can do. A quarter to half of your security stack requires vendor conversations, and those conversations take time to schedule, complete, and convert into signed contracts. If you've factored that into your timeline, it's a managed process. If you haven't, it becomes an emergency when a customer is asking questions you can't answer.
Being specific about what you need before you start shopping also shortens the sales cycles. When you've anchored to a framework such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or whatever applies to your situation, you can be precise about which categories actually matter. Shopping without that clarity is how you end up in multiple simultaneous sales cycles for tools that overlap.
The collation and integration overhead isn't an inevitable feature of running security at a startup. But getting out from under it requires being deliberate about what you buy in the first place, and understanding how the tools will fit together before you've signed the contracts.
That's the problem I built Fencer to address: one platform instead of a fragmented stack, with findings across code, cloud, and infrastructure in a single prioritized view, without the manual collation work. If that overhead is where your security hours are going, it's worth a look.
If you're still working through which categories to prioritize before you start scheduling demos, the Startup Security Field Guide covers that for early-stage teams.
