There was a pattern we kept seeing that genuinely bothered us.
A startup would get to Series A, or land their first enterprise customer, and suddenly need a pentest report right now. They'd scramble to find a vendor, get hit with a 4-week scoping call process, a €30k quote, and a PDF that mostly described low-severity findings their scanner already caught.
They didn't need a €30k PDF. They needed someone to actually look at their auth layer, their API, their trust boundaries and tell them what was actually broken.
That frustration is what became Faultline Security.
The problem we were trying to solve
When we started talking to early-stage founders about security, the same themes kept coming up:
- "We know we need a pentest but have no idea where to start"
- "The quotes we got were either too expensive or too vague"
- "We have a SOC 2 audit in 8 weeks — is that enough time?"
- "Our enterprise prospect is asking for a pentest report and we've never done one"
None of these are hard problems, conceptually.
We get it! Security is almost always the thing that gets pushed to the next sprint, the next quarter, the next funding round. When you're a small team trying to ship and grow, it's genuinely hard to prioritize. But here's what we keep telling founders: starting early isn't harder, it's actually easier.
When your codebase is smaller, your attack surface is narrower, and your team is close to every decision, building a solid security foundation takes a fraction of the effort it will cost you later. The expensive, painful pentests we kept seeing weren't just a vendor problem, they were the result of years of deferred security work landing all at once. We wanted to help teams get ahead of that.
We wanted to build something different: fixed pricing, a scoping process that takes 24 hours not 2 weeks, and findings that are actually written for engineers who need to fix them — not auditors who need to check a box.
What building this taught us
Founders don't know what they need until you ask the right questions.
The first version of our intake process asked things like "what environments are in scope?" and got blank stares. We rewrote it to ask "what would hurt the most if a competitor got in?" That changed everything. Suddenly people could actually answer.
The report is the product.
We spent more time rethinking how findings are written than anything else. A finding that says "Cross-Site Scripting detected on /search" is useless. A finding that shows the exact payload, the session token that was exfiltrated in the proof of concept, and the two-line code fix — that is a product.
Timelines are the most anxiety-producing part of the whole process.
The question we get asked more than any other is: how long is this actually going to take? People have compliance deadlines, fundraise timelines, sales deals on the line. They need a real answer, not "it depends."
We wrote a detailed breakdown of this recently: How Long Does a Startup Pentest Take? — the short answer is 3 to 10 days of active testing plus 2 days for the report, so most teams have something in hand in under two weeks. But the full picture is more nuanced, and worth reading if you're scoping something with a hard deadline.
The parts nobody tells you about starting a security company
Building in security is weird. You're asking people to trust you with access to their most sensitive systems, before they know you well. Trust-building is the entire job before any actual testing happens.
We also learned that pricing transparency is itself a differentiator. Most pentesting firms won't put a number on their website. Scope varies, complexity varies. But the endless "contact us for pricing" dance adds friction that small teams don't have time for. Showing a real range upfront, even approximate, changes the quality of conversations you have.
And the writing matters more than we expected. Content like the timeline post above has brought in more qualified leads than any cold outreach we've done. People who are googling "how long does a pentest take" are in the buying process. Meeting them where they are with an honest, detailed answer builds more trust than any sales email.
Where we stand now
Faultline is purpose-built for SaaS companies and startups that are hitting real security milestones — first enterprise customer, SOC 2 audit, Series A. We're not trying to compete with the big firms doing 6-month red team engagements for banks. We're trying to be the best option for a 20-person company that ships fast and needs a pentest that matches their pace.
If you're building something and wondering whether you need a pentest, when to do it, or how to think about scope we're happy to talk. No sales process. Just people who care about shipping secure software.
You can also scope an engagement directly and get a fixed-price proposal within 24 hours.
What questions do you have about security at the early stage? Drop them in the comments. we read everything.