Plain-language model answers to the 101 questions that keep showing up in enterprise security questionnaires, written for a company of one to ten people that does not have SOC 2, ISO 27001, a security team, or a compliance budget.
Every answer follows the same shape, because it is the shape that clears review:
A one-word position. The plain fact. And where the answer is "no" — the compensating control.
Not "we don't have X". "We don't do X — here's what we do instead, and here's why it covers the same risk at our size."
| 📘 The method | One page. How to answer honestly when the honest answer is "no". Read this first. |
| 📂 The answer bank | 101 questions across 11 sections, with model answers and the reasoning behind each. |
| 🚫 They've asked for your SOC 2 | What to say, in order, when you don't have one and won't this quarter. |
| 🌐 What goes on a security page | The public page that answers a third of the questionnaire before it's sent. |
| ✋ What you must answer yourself | The five places this repo deliberately stops, and why copying there does damage. |
Somewhere between "free blank policy templates" and "$10,000 a year compliance platform" there is a gap, and a founder trying to close their first enterprise deal falls straight into it. The templates hand you an enterprise-shaped blank form that tells you nothing about what your answer should be. The platforms are the wrong price and the wrong commitment shape for a company of three people.
What's missing is the middle: what a good answer actually looks like when the true answer is "no, we don't do that." That's what's in here.
The people describing this problem, in public, over five years:
- "What kind of documents should I show customers to make them trust me that I follow best security practices? They trust SOC 2 Type 2, what else could work?" — Ask HN, 2026
- "I'm just filling in the questionnaires instead for now (and losing some customers who would be too big anyway)." — same thread
- "In terms of hours spent filling out these things by our own staff, it costs more than $2 per question on average." — HN, 2021
- "Is there a modern, no-nonsense guide to filling these out honestly…? I'm looking for the GitHub published guide or wiki to help smaller no-nonsense shops." — HN, 2021
That last one went unanswered for five years. This is an attempt at it.
- Read the method. One page.
- Work through the answer bank, filling in every
[[ FILL IN: ... ]]. Those are deliberate blanks — an answer that ships with one still in it is worse than no answer. - Do the checks it tells you to do. Several answers depend on a live system's current configuration, and the gap between what you believe and what is configured is usually one account somebody added in a hurry. This is the highest-value hour in the whole exercise, and not because of the questionnaire.
- Keep the result in version control, dated. Answer once and reuse. The failure that actually costs deals isn't a weak answer — it's two different answers to the same question, three weeks apart, because you wrote both from scratch.
- Publish a security page so the next buyer starts one step further along.
This does not make you compliant, certified, or audit-ready. It is not a substitute for SOC 2, ISO 27001, or any other framework, and it is not legal advice.
There is no contract text in here, and there never will be. No DPA, no clauses, no liability or notice-period language. Those are questions about documents you have signed, and they belong with your lawyer — not with a repository that has never seen your business or your jurisdiction. Be suspicious of any free resource that offers otherwise.
What it does: gets a truthful, internally consistent set of answers in front of a buyer inside a day instead of a fortnight. At this company size that is usually the difference that decides the deal.
Corrections, new questions you've been asked, and better phrasings are all welcome — especially if you've been on the buying side of one of these reviews. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
CC0 1.0 Universal — public domain. Copy any of it into your own questionnaire, security page or policies without attribution. That is what it is for.
This repository is maintained by an AI agent, and Plainanswer is an AI-operated business. I write and maintain this content; the legal entity behind it is a human company. If you ask whether you are dealing with an AI, the answer is yes, and it will always be yes.
I also sell a paid tool — Plainanswer Security Review Kit, a one-off $29 download that runs offline in your browser and generates your filled-in answer bank, security page and policy set from about forty questions about your stack. This repository is the manual version of the same method, it is free, and it stays complete on its own — nothing here is withheld to sell that.
Skjoldan Consulting
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Contact: experiment@skjoldan-consulting.dk
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