Building a SOC on a budget: the case for transparent EDR

Building a SOC doesn’t require a dedicated threat-intel team, a seven-figure budget, or a war room with blinking screens. But it does require tooling - and for most teams, endpoint detection and response (EDR) is the hardest line item to pin down.

The problem isn’t just cost. It’s opacity.

Why EDR pricing is a problem for lean teams

Ask any mid-size MSSP operator or in-house SOC engineer how much their current EDR platform costs, and you’ll likely get a qualified answer: “it depends on the tier”, “we negotiated a deal”, or “I’d need to ask procurement”. That opacity is not accidental.

Enterprise EDR vendors - CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint - price their platforms through account executives and annual contracts. Published data sheets, if they exist at all, list “contact us” where a number should be. This works fine if you’re a 5,000-seat enterprise with a procurement team. It works poorly if you’re:

• An MSSP managing 20-200 client endpoints per customer
• An internal SOC with a fixed annual security budget
• A startup that needs enterprise-grade detection without enterprise-grade spend

The result is that lean teams often defer EDR entirely, or bolt together open-source tools that need sustained engineering to maintain. Neither outcome is good.

Here’s how the major platforms compare on the basics:

Platform	Pricing published?	Free tier	AI triage included
CrowdStrike Falcon	Quote-only (enterprise tiers)	No	No (separate Falcon tier)
SentinelOne Singularity	Quote-only	No	Add-on (Purple AI)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint	Via M365 licence bundle	Partial	Copilot for Security (add-on)
LightEDR	Yes - from £5/agent/month	Yes (up to 5 agents)	Yes (bring your own LLM)

What transparent pricing actually changes

Transparent pricing does two things: it lets you budget accurately, and it signals something about the vendor’s relationship with you.

If a vendor won’t show you a number until you’ve sat through three discovery calls, that number will almost certainly change between “indicative pricing” and the actual invoice. Transparent pricing - real per-agent rates on the website - removes that friction entirely.

LightEDR starts at £5 per agent per month with a free tier for up to 5 agents. No hidden platform fees, no minimum seat counts, no separate charge for the API or integrations. If you manage 50 endpoints, you know before you deploy what the monthly bill looks like.

For MSSPs, the maths gets more useful. You can quote clients a unit cost based on a known input. Margin calculation is straightforward. And because LightEDR’s control plane is multi-tenant by design, you manage all client environments from a single interface - so your operational overhead per client is lower than platforms that require separate deployments per customer.

The feature trade-off question

Transparent pricing only matters if the platform is worth paying for. So what does a lean-budget SOC actually get?

Real-time behavioural detection mapped to MITRE ATT&CK (an industry-standard adversary behaviour framework), a 90-day telemetry window, and one-click endpoint containment. The agent is a static binary under 40 MB - no dependencies, no kernel module to maintain, no separate sensor service to monitor. Deployment is a single command.

AI-assisted triage is included by default. For every high or critical alert, LightEDR automatically sends context to whichever LLM provider you’ve configured - Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Gemini, or a local Ollama instance - and attaches an explanation plus suggested remediation steps alongside the alert. It runs asynchronously, so it never delays alert ingestion. You bring your own API key; we don’t touch the cost or the data.

For comparison: CrowdStrike’s baseline EDR tier doesn’t include AI triage. SentinelOne’s Purple AI is a separate add-on. LightEDR’s AI triage is part of the standard platform once you configure a provider - no upgrade required.

Getting started without a sales process

There’s a working free tier. You can run LightEDR on up to 5 agents without a contract, credit card, or a call with anyone. Connect your LLM provider, deploy the agent, and see real alerts in the dashboard. If it fits your environment, scaling up uses the published rate.

If you’re evaluating EDR for an MSSP deployment or building out a new in-house SOC, get in touch via the contact form - we’ll give you a straight answer on pricing and fit.