How is this different from hiring a compliance consultant?

The two aren't strictly the same thing — a consultant sells hours, we sell an ongoing platform — but SMBs regularly evaluate them against each other, so here's the honest comparison:

Cost: A vCISO or GRC consultant for an SMB engagement is usually $150–$300/hour, or $30k–$80k for a first-time framework readiness project. Scarlet Risk Pro is $99/mo — $1,188/year — and Elite is $3,000/year. The math isn't close for a Type 1 readiness.

Speed: A consulting engagement is scoped in weeks and delivered over 3–6 months. Scarlet Risk is live in 20 minutes and delivers a first posture baseline in an hour.

Persistence: The single biggest problem with a consultant is what happens on Day 91. The engagement ends, the shared Google Drive goes stale, and the next audit starts from a partially-cold state. Scarlet Risk stays running between audits — evidence is collected continuously, posture is monitored, and the risk register updates itself.

Where a consultant still wins: highly specialized situations — a novel HITRUST implementation, a FedRAMP moderate authorization, or a genuinely complex integration audit. For those, use Scarlet Risk as the persistent platform and hire a specialist for the 40–80 hours where their judgment is worth the hourly rate. Many of our customers do exactly this.

Bottom line: Scarlet Risk replaces the 80% of a consulting engagement that's really software and manual evidence collection. Keep the human for the 20% that's actually judgment.