59
points
mlitwiniuk
Joined 258 karma
Former CEO of Prograils.com (acquired by Jobandtalent), where I later served as Engineering Director.
Since early 2024, I've been working full-time on humadroid.io - building an affordable GRC platform that helps small and medium businesses handle compliance and asset management without enterprise-level complexity.
Always curious about how we can make business operations simpler for teams that don't have dedicated compliance departments.
- Honestly, great questions - this is either good exercise for me or actionable feedback. Both valuable.
Right now I recommend auditors but don't have formal partnerships. Vanta/Drata's auditor relationships are... let's say on the edge of conflicted? I don't want to go that route. And at $250/month I can't play the referral game anyway (Vanta pays hundreds per referral - that math doesn't work for me).
What I can do is democratize access. I've watched too many small teams get excited about SOC 2, then ghost once they see the total cost - $15k+ for the platform, $20k+ for consultants, $15k+ for auditors. I want the barrier low enough that smaller businesses can actually get certified and compete with bigger players.
On the checkbox vs. real security thing - you're right, it's tricky. I don't want to be another "generate docs, tick boxes, forget until next audit" platform. But targeting smaller businesses actually helps here - when you're a 10-person company, management is in the compliance process, not just signing off on someone else's work. It tends to stick better.
That said, sometimes I wonder if I help too much. My System Description assistant is almost unfair - what used to take weeks now takes minutes. Is that checkbox-enabling or democratizing? Genuinely not sure.
And yes - "vs Vanta/Drata" pages are going on the list. You're not the first to ask.
- Not yet - but literally finishing this week. Promised a customer I'd ship it before Christmas, so that's been my deadline.
AWS and GitHub integrations first. It auto-fetches and verifies the data (where applicable), creating read-only evidence snapshots. No manual screenshots or "I swear this config was set correctly" moments during audits.
Part of the standard price - no integration tier upsell.
- The big difference is context-awareness. Vanta/Drata give you templates and checklists. Humadroid starts by understanding your company - what you actually do, how you operate, your tech stack.
From there, the AI generates policies that are yours, not generic docs with [COMPANY NAME] placeholders. Same with control descriptions - they're specific and actionable for your setup, not "implement access control" with no context. It also identifies risks based on what you actually do and helps build business continuity plans around your real critical processes.
You still review everything (it's compliance, not magic), but you're editing 80% done work instead of staring at a blank template wondering where to start.
The price difference is real too, but honestly that's a side effect of being early and solo - not the core value prop.
- Humadroid (https://humadroid.io) - AI-Assisted SOC 2 & ISO 27001 compliance for small teams. $125/month flat (for now, during beta).
Recently crossed the $500/month mark after a painful pivot from HR tech earlier this year. The whole thing started because I did ISO 27001 back in 2019 and was completely lost - overpaid for consultants, got lost with policies and controls, figured it out the hard way.
Passed SOC 2 Type I earlier this year using only Humadroid (yes, dogfooding a compliance tool through an actual audit was... an experience).
Currently finishing automated evidence collection (AWS and GitHub integrations first). Pretty proud of that one - compliance shouldn't mean "panic-screenshot everything before audit."
- Thanks! Really appreciate the interest. We already support a major part of ISO 27001 - actually releasing our Statement of Applicability tomorrow or the day after. I went through ISO certification at my previous company, and that experience is what triggered building Humadroid in the first place. The pain was real! NIS2 is definitely on our radar - planning to have support for it by Q4 2025. The public sector requirements you mentioned are exactly the kind of use cases we're building for.
- Working on Humadroid - trying to make SOC2/ISO27001 compliance less painful for small businesses. The $30-50K consultant route is brutal for startups, so we're building an AI-assisted platform that helps with policy generation and guidance.
Still in beta and learning a lot from each customer we onboard. We're actually going through our own SOC2 assessment in August, which has been... educational. Recently added business continuity and incident tracking features. Trying to build something that's actually helpful rather than just another compliance checkbox tool.
If anyone's interested: humadroid.io or feel free to join our beta waitlist at https://humadroid.io/join-the-humadroid-beta-waitlist/
If anyone's been through the compliance journey, would love to hear what worked (or didn't work) for you!
- That's a great suggestion, thanks! More or less it works like so, policy drafts are auto-generated by AI, you need to go through controls and provide the evidence. To support you better on this, we allow redoing their description with your context - and that helps a lot. On top of that we're able to generate some potential risks for you (as this part is also tricky to get started with). Now I'm completing business continuity planning (again - will get AI assistance) and then we need to add incidents - that should make us a complete platform and hopefully I'll be able to do Show HN post ;) Nonetheless - thanks again, we'll add how the process looks like to the landing page.
- You could even use google drive with set of spreadsheets and screenshot. The biggest problem is getting through requirements, understanding what they actually mean and having some sort of framework for writing policies. But once you past that, it's manageable. Vanta/Drata just make this easier.
Vanta/Drata are big players and they're charging big time for their platform. That's why I've started working on own startups, that's meant to disrupt this for SMBs - by making it waaay more affordable (for managing compliance, not attestation/certification itself, which we don't do).
- Well, if we're picky here, then it should actually be: SOC 2® ;)
- Recently I was preparing video for my YC application [1]. I've used RecordOnce[2] and actually it worked pretty great - I've recorded my actions together with voice. It transcribed voice to text and then used text to voice again to render the video. For me, as a non-native speaker, this was really great. And I could edit voice description of my actions post-recording - worked like a breeze. It still rough around the edges, but nonetheless I highly recommend it (for reference - until now I've used Screen Flow for multiple years)
- Thanks. Any examples of Python 3 code worth looking at?
- https://maciej.litwiniuk.net/
I wanted to start with "this week in review" series, but it ended quite quickly.
Now I want to publish lesson learned while building my side-project (https://humadroid.dev), which is a missing tool I wish I had when running software house year-and-a-half ago, before I sold it.
Topics considered for near future:
* lessons learned while coding it in Rails with hotwire & stimulus
* lessons learned actually sellign it to people (Open-Startup idea/movement is close to my beliefs).
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- However stupid that may sound, using corded headphones helps me a lot.
- And I thought I’m the only freak to listen to goa/psy trance while coding - I’m most likely to get in the flow while listening to it.
- Haha, yeah. We've covered whole company, but yeah, you're right and it's a joke.
Regarding processes - yes and no - if you can viably proof, that process is not (yet) needed and you're doing things in reasonably manner, then you're good. It's up to you what processes you'll introduce to the company. What we think we did well is that whole certification did not change how we work and it was (almost) painless for our employees (or at least I like to think so).
What I'm trying to do differently is depth of context. Humadroid learns about your company first - how you operate, your stack, your processes. From there it generates control descriptions that are actually actionable for your setup, and policies that need minimal review rather than a full rewrite.
Whether that's enough differentiation? Ask me in a year.