Quick answer: SOC as a service costs between $300 and $8,000 per month for most companies in 2026. A shared 24/7 SOC for up to 25 endpoints runs $300 to $900 per month, 26 to 100 endpoints $600 to $1,800, 101 to 250 endpoints $1,500 to $4,000, and 251 to 600 endpoints $3,000 to $8,000. Building the same capability in house costs $45,000+ per month before tooling. Partner pricing through a provider like ITSecOps is typically cheaper than buying monitoring, SIEM and response tools separately.
SOC as a service pricing by company size
These are real 2026 street prices for a shared 24/7 SOC with threat monitoring, triage and guided response. Servers count double because they produce more telemetry and carry more risk.
| Company size (endpoints, servers count double) | Typical monthly price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 25 | $300 to $900 | 24/7 monitoring, L1 triage, email and phone alerting, monthly report |
| 26 to 100 | $600 to $1,800 | Everything above plus L2 investigation and guided containment |
| 101 to 250 | $1,500 to $4,000 | Dedicated escalation path, compliance reporting, quarterly reviews |
| 251 to 600 | $3,000 to $8,000 | Named analysts, custom detections, IR retainer hours included |
| Over 600 | Custom quote | Scoped on log volume, sites and compliance requirements |
Where you land inside a bracket depends on coverage scope and log sources, not on a per endpoint rate card. Use the calculator on our shared SOC page to see your bracket in under a minute, or request an exact quote and get it by email within one business day.
What is included in SOC as a service
- 24/7/365 monitoring of endpoints, servers, firewalls, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and cloud workloads
- A staffed operations floor with L1 triage, L2 investigation and L3 escalation, not an unmonitored alert queue
- SIEM included or connected to the one you already pay for
- Threat mitigation: isolate a host, disable an account, block an indicator, at any hour
- Compliance evidence for NIS2, CMMC, SOC 2, ISO 27001 and cyber insurance questionnaires
What moves the price up or down
- Coverage hours: 24/7 costs more than business hours, and is the reason to buy at all. Most intrusions escalate at night and on weekends when nobody is watching.
- Response scope: monitoring and alerting sits at the lower end of a bracket, active containment and an incident response retainer at the upper end.
- Log sources: every extra firewall, SaaS app and cloud account adds ingest and tuning work.
- Compliance reporting: mapped evidence for NIS2, CMMC or SOC 2 Type 2 adds analyst time.
- Shared vs dedicated: a shared SOC floor watching many companies is typically 80 percent cheaper than a dedicated team with the same skills.
Why 2026 keeps proving the case for 24/7 monitoring
The breaches that surfaced in October 2026 are a study in what no monitoring, or business hours monitoring, actually costs. The Oracle Health breach disclosed through a Texas state filing ran for roughly 20 months before the public learned of it, with data on close to 20 million people copied from a legacy server. The Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center reported unauthorized access that lasted nearly a year and touched records of more than 3 million people. And in the Warlock ransomware campaign, attackers disabled the security software on about 40 hosts within roughly two hours, which is exactly the window where a staffed SOC with tamper alerts either catches the intrusion or the company spends the next quarter recovering from it.
SOC as a service vs in-house SOC cost
A credible in-house 24/7 SOC needs 8 to 10 analysts to cover three shifts, weekends and leave, plus a SIEM, threat intelligence and management. That is $45,000+ per month in most markets before the first license. SOC as a service delivers the same operations floor, TV dashboards, hotlines and shift hierarchy as a shared service, which is how a 50 person company gets enterprise grade monitoring for the price of one junior hire’s week.
How to pay less for a SOC
- Choose a shared SOC rather than a dedicated pod unless a contract forces isolation
- Right-size log sources: start with endpoints, identity and firewalls, add SaaS apps once tuned
- Bundle MDR and SOC with one provider instead of paying for overlapping tools: see our MDR pricing breakdown
- Buy through a partner: ITSecOps partners with every industry standard vendor, and partner pricing is cheaper than buying direct
FAQ
How much does a 24/7 SOC cost for a small business?
$300 to $1,800 per month for most small businesses: $300 to $900 up to 25 endpoints, $600 to $1,800 for 26 to 100 endpoints, as a shared 24/7 service with triage and guided response included.
What is the difference between SOC as a service and MDR?
MDR is product centric: a vendor monitors its own agent on your endpoints, typically at $6 to $22 per device. SOC as a service is wider: it watches endpoints, firewalls, identity, email and cloud together, correlates across them, and gives you people to call at 3am. Many companies run MDR inside the SOC service.
Does SOC as a service include a SIEM?
Usually yes at these price points, either included in the bracket or connected to a SIEM you already own. See our SIEM pricing guide for what standalone ingest actually costs.
How fast can a SOC go live?
Onboarding for a typical SMB takes days: agents and log forwarding in the first week, tuned baselines inside the first month.
Is a shared SOC acceptable for NIS2, CMMC or SOC 2?
Yes. The frameworks require monitoring, detection and response capability with evidence. A shared SOC with proper data separation and reporting satisfies auditors, and is how most SMBs meet NIS2 and CMMC monitoring requirements affordably.
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Related: Shared SOC 24×7 with price calculator · Our 24×7 SOC service · SIEM pricing 2026 · MDR pricing 2026 · Live vendor price comparison