What are the best compliance options for developers who find traditional GRC tools too heavy and expensive?

Quick answer

Developers don't hate compliance; they hate compliance tools that mean screenshots, spreadsheets, and meetings. The developer-friendly alternative treats compliance like infrastructure: declared in code, verified by automated checks, and enforced in CI. OptiTech ships a CLI, a REST API, and a Terraform provider, so controls become something you version and test rather than a document you forget.

What compliance as code looks like in practice

Controls in your pipeline. A misconfigured deployment (say, a storage bucket exposed publicly) fails the pipeline before it ships, instead of surfacing in an audit six months later. See running compliance checks on every pull request.
Evidence from APIs, not screenshots. OptiTech reads state from GitHub, AWS, Azure, Entra ID, and your MDM through read-only API access. Nobody pastes screenshots into a shared drive. See how evidence collection works without agents.
Infrastructure as code for the platform itself. Manage workspaces, integrations, and control assignments with Terraform or Pulumi.
One-command setup for common checks from the CLI. See setting up a compliance check from the CLI.

Why heavyweight GRC tools fail engineering teams

Enterprise GRC suites are built for compliance officers, cost six figures a year, and take months to implement. The workflow assumes a dedicated team feeding the tool manually. In a startup or scale-up, compliance is a side responsibility of the CTO or a senior engineer, and any tool that demands manual upkeep loses to the backlog.

The result is predictable: the wiki page goes stale, the audit becomes a fire drill, and engineers burn a sprint collecting evidence that automation could have gathered continuously.

What this costs

You don't need an enterprise contract for developer workflows. The API and CI checks are available from the standard plans, with full API access on Enterprise. Compare that to a GRC suite where API access is an enterprise add-on, if it exists at all.