"We don't need a pen test yet, we're not going through SOC 2." We hear this from founders and engineering teams all the time. And it makes sense on the surface: if nobody is requiring you to get a penetration test, why bother? But compliance is only one reason to test your application's security, and probably not the most important one.
Compliance Isn't the Only Reason to Test
SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA all require regular security assessments, and a pen test is a natural part of that process. But if you're only doing pen tests to satisfy an auditor, you're leaving most of the value on the table. The real point of a penetration test is to see your application the way an attacker sees it.
Even if you have zero compliance obligations, your website is still a target. Attackers don't check whether you're SOC 2 certified before probing your endpoints. They look for the easy stuff: missing security headers, exposed server information, injectable inputs, and misconfigurations that can be exploited in minutes.
A penetration test tells you what information your application is leaking, what an outsider can learn about your infrastructure, and where your defenses have gaps. That's useful whether you're a startup with ten users or a company with ten thousand.
Why You Should Test Early
Most teams wait until they "need" a pen test, usually when a customer asks for one or a compliance audit shows up on the calendar. By then, you may have months or years of accumulated security misconfigurations baked into your application.
There are good reasons to test early instead:
- Cheaper to fix: A missing header is a five-minute fix today. Finding it during an incident is a different story. Security issues caught early in development cost far less to remediate than ones found in production.
- Establishes a baseline: Your first pen test gives you a reference point. Follow-up tests let you track improvement and verify that new features haven't introduced regressions.
- Changes how your team thinks: When developers see a real pen test report with concrete findings, security stops being abstract. It becomes part of how they write code.
- Prepares you for the question: Eventually, a customer, partner, or investor will ask about your security posture. Having pen test reports on hand, along with evidence of remediation, is a much better answer than "we haven't looked into it yet."
AI-Generated Code Makes Pen Testing More Important
AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Cursor are helping developers ship faster than ever. That's great for productivity, but it also means security issues can get introduced faster too.
Here's what we see in practice:
- Patterns without context: AI models generate code based on patterns from training data. They don't understand your application's specific threat model. A generated API endpoint might work correctly but lack input validation, rate limiting, or authentication checks.
- Looks clean, might not be safe: AI-generated code often looks polished and functional, which makes it easy to trust. But a neatly structured function that's vulnerable to SQL injection looks the same as one that isn't. You have to actually test it.
- More code, more surface area: When teams ship faster, the attack surface grows faster. More endpoints, more integrations, more features, more places for things to go wrong.
- Outdated patterns: AI models are trained on historical code, which may include deprecated security practices. What passed two years ago may not hold up against current threats.
AI coding tools are great. Keep using them. But someone still needs to verify that the output is secure, and a penetration test is one of the best ways to do that.
What a Pen Test Actually Tells You
If you've never had a pen test done, you might be surprised by what comes back. A good pen test report gives you a prioritized list of findings with specific remediation steps. Common findings include:
- Missing or misconfigured security headers (HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, Content-Security-Policy)
- Server information leakage through headers or error messages
- Potential vulnerability to compression-based attacks like BREACH
- Exposed infrastructure details that help attackers with reconnaissance
- Missing rate limiting on sensitive endpoints
Each finding comes with a risk rating and steps to fix it. Many of these issues can be resolved in an afternoon, and fixing them significantly reduces your exposure.
Get Started
You don't need a compliance requirement to benefit from a pen test. If your application handles user data, processes transactions, or represents your business online, you should know where the gaps are. The earlier you test, the easier and cheaper it is to fix what you find. And with more code being generated by AI, independent security verification matters more than it used to.
At Fast Pen Tests, we keep it simple. $495 per domain gets you a comprehensive black box penetration test with a detailed PDF report delivered within 24 hours. No procurement process, no waiting weeks. Don't wait for someone to ask about your security posture. Find out for yourself.