What happened to Laika
Laika was an early entrant in GRC automation for SOC 2, founded in New York in 2019 and operating alongside Vanta, Drata and Secureframe. The platform did what the category does: automated evidence collection, a control library, policy templates, compliance dashboards. It had one structural difference from the rest, and it is the one that still defines the company today: it operated its own licensed CPA entity, so the audit could be delivered in-house rather than handed to a partner firm.
In March 2023 Laika announced a rebrand to Thoropass. The company said at the time that it was the same product and service under a new name and visual identity. The legal entity remains Laika Compliance, LLC, now trading as Thoropass Assurance for the audit arm. The Laika brand was retired and existing customers were moved to Thoropass branding. The rebrand announcement and current positioning are on the Thoropass site at thoropass.com.
There is no Laika price, and no Thoropass list price either
The first half of that is obvious: a retired brand has no price because it has no product. The second half is the useful part. Thoropass does not publish a list price the way several of its competitors do, and the reason is structural rather than evasive.
Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Sprinto, Scytale, Scrut and Strike Graph all publish list-price dimensions on AWS Marketplace, because they sell software and software can carry a list price. Thoropass sells a subscription with a SOC 2 examination inside it, and an examination is an attestation engagement performed under AICPA standards, scoped and priced per client, fixed in an engagement letter. No CPA firm publishes a rate card for one. So there is no Thoropass number to look up, in either era, and this page does not carry an estimate of one. What you find quoted elsewhere is somebody's invoice or somebody's guess.
For existing Laika customers
Continuity was the point of the rebrand and it held. The platform underlying Thoropass is the same platform under a new brand, the interface and workflow carried over, and the audit relationship carried over too: the in-house CPA arm that delivered Laika audits now operates as Thoropass Assurance, the same legal entity.
The decision point is the renewal, and it is worth being clear about what is actually being decided, because it is not really a price question. It is whether you want your auditor and your platform to be the same vendor. Keeping them together buys one contract and no handoff. Separating them buys the ability to change either without changing the other, which matters if you ever need a specific firm, for instance on an IPO track or because a large customer names its acceptable auditors.
Price both routes properly before deciding, and count the audit fee on both sides. The common error is comparing a Thoropass renewal quote against a competitor's published platform price, which leaves the audit out of one side and makes the bundle look worse by the whole cost of an engagement. The Thoropass cost page sets out the three-step method for doing that comparison honestly.
For new buyers who landed here searching for Laika
Evaluate Thoropass as the successor, and put the platform-only vendors beside it. The useful asymmetry is that the platform-only side of that comparison can be anchored to real published numbers, because several of those vendors publish list-price dimensions on AWS Marketplace, while the bundled side cannot be anchored to anything but a quote.
The realistic alternatives are Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Sprinto, Scrut Automation, Scytale and Strike Graph, each paired with a separately contracted CPA firm. The platforms comparison sets out every published dimension with the employee band it is scoped to, and the audit firms guide covers the half of the programme that no vendor publishes at all.
Who delivers a Thoropass audit
Thoropass SOC 2 audits are delivered by Thoropass Assurance, a licensed certified public accounting firm registered with the AICPA and subject to AICPA peer review, operating as the trading name of Laika Compliance, LLC. The deliverable is a standard SOC 2 report issued under AT-C 205, the same examination standard that governs every other firm's report. A SOC 2 report has no lesser version, so the credibility question that people expect to find here does not arise. Whether the bundled model suits a particular buyer is a commercial question, and it is covered on the Thoropass page.