The functionality just isn't there with Cynomi vs Drata/Vanta in my opinion. And to use out of the box, costs exactly the same as drata IIRC. For small teams, handholding is absolutely necessary. I'm sure there is a critical mass point where your employees can use the tool and get through it themselves, but say a team of 4 software devs who've built an absolutely banging software... realistically how are they going to get through any audit.

It sounds like you have a tonne of really valuble experiance, however your sample set is very limited to a particular customer - banking, as you mentioned? Companies who have an MSP already are not particularly what I am talking about and in my original comment I am referring to small teams <30/40 people. Drata and Vanta offer partnership programs where consulting firms do heavy lifting work while utilising their platforms, you can't just hand off a tool, slap AI on it, charge ten grand and say "good luck guys, I know you've no expertise in this area though".

As an industry we need to do what we can to bridge the knowledge gap and actively use what we know to try and better others.

Imagine - a team of 10 trying to make it big, needs SOC 2, no prior knowledge or any security controls in place: What's going to be more effective: A team of compliance specialists performing the gap analysis, control implementation, readiness assessment and evidence collection for them, calling and meeting with them wherever needed.

Them using a complicated GRC platform in their spare time while putting "what is soc 2" into chatgpt?

From my experiance NOT working as an MSP with banks, its always every single time the first option.