The SOC 2 Trap: Why Dependabot Isn’t Moving Your Security Needle

If you’re an early-stage startup prepping for SOC 2, odds are someone’s going to flip the switch on Dependabot. It’s free, easy to configure, and sends a reassuring stream of security alerts straight to your repos. On paper, it checks the box: “Yes, we’re monitoring for vulnerabilities.”

That’s exactly why it shows up so often during audits—it’s the lowest-friction answer to the “do you have any security tooling?” question. The problem is what happens next.

What Actually Happens: Alerts, Ignored

Most teams install Dependabot with good intentions. For the first week or two, the alerts feel useful: a pull request opens, someone merges a patch. But it doesn’t take long before those alerts start to pile up. They create friction in the workflow with updates that require manual testing, or dependency bumps that feel risky right before a sprint deadline.

So the team does what every team does: they put it off. The alerts keep coming, but they stop being acted on. Eventually, they stop being looked at.

This is the normal, expected outcome of security tooling that runs outside the product development loop. The updates are detached from real features and workstreams. They arrive on their own timeline, and almost never align with what the engineering team is focused on. The result is fatigue from having too many alerts that can’t be handled in the flow of actual development. Dependabot doesn’t even move the security needle, because it can tell you to patch, but it can’t remediate.

What all this means in the end: most teams going through SOC 2 spend their limited time on the wrong surface area, cleaning up stale libraries while first-party vulnerabilities go untouched.

SOC 2’s Real Purpose: Showing Security Is Operationalized

Auditors don’t care whether you use Dependabot, Amplify, or something else entirely. What they’re evaluating is whether your organization can identify, triage, and respond to security risk in a consistent, documented way. If you’re piping alerts into GitHub and no one’s acting on them, that’s a liability…with a paper trail.

And while you can technically pass SOC 2 with broken or ineffective tools (as long as you can demonstrate the intent to monitor vulnerabilities) that only gets you through the audit. It doesn’t help with investor due diligence, enterprise procurement, or the next customer who asks to review your remediation flow.

More importantly, it doesn’t help you build a security posture that scales with the company. If your devs are ignoring alerts today, they’ll still be ignoring them when you’re twice the size and under real pressure.

That’s why the strongest approach to SOC 2 is one that puts functionality first by taking action and integrating into the workflows your team already uses.

The Better Free Option: Actionable, Developer-Native Fixes

Here’s what most teams don’t realize: Amplify is also free—for the exact same use case. 

If you're a small engineering org going through SOC 2, you can get started with Amplify at no cost. The difference is that it goes way beyond showing you problems, and does the hard part: it solves them.

Amplify sits inside the development loop. It scans code in active pull requests, flags vulnerabilities as they’re introduced, and proposes production-grade fixes inline before the code merges. And if a developer wants to act on a suggestion, they can. Immediately, with no handoffs or context-switching (and without security tickets sitting in backlog purgatory).

Instead of surfacing yet another alert, Amplify surfaces an actual path to resolution. What’s more, your devs see it, which means they’re getting more secure with every commit instead of just demonstrating compliance.

And because Amplify plugs directly into GitHub or GitLab and works silently in the background, it requires almost no effort to maintain. Your devs can keep shipping (while getting better at making their own code secure). Your compliance team has real evidence of remediation. And your security posture improves without a second system to manage.

If you're going to reach for a free tool during SOC 2, you might as well pick one that does something.

If It’s Free Either Way, Pick the One That Works

Security tooling doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective. At the early stage (especially during SOC 2 prep) what matters is choosing tools that your team will actually use beyond the initial deployment.

Amplify gives you the same benefits most teams hope to get from Dependabot: visibility, automation, and credibility during an audit. But it also gives you something far more useful—real remediations, delivered in the flow of development, with zero impact on velocity. It’s still free at the stage when you need it most. It just doesn’t get ignored.

So if your team is about to install a free tool anyway, pick the one that moves the needle.

Give Amplify a try today—it’s free for small teams, and we think you’ll love it.