Alternatives to 42Crunch at Pre-seed startups

API security for pre-seed products is often constrained by limited security staff and engineering bandwidth. A self-service scanner that requires no agents or SDK integration can reduce friction while still providing actionable results. Black-box testing with read-only methods keeps the scan safe and non-disruptive, and completing a scan in under a minute supports fast development cycles.

The scanner maps findings to OWASP API Top 10 (2023), PCI-DSS 4.0, and SOC 2 Type II controls. Detection categories include authentication bypass, broken object level authorization, excessive data exposure, input validation issues, rate limiting weaknesses, SSRF indicators, and LLM/AI security probes. Each finding includes remediation guidance to help your team address the risk.

• Authentication — multi-method bypass and JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none, HS256, expired tokens, missing claims, and sensitive data in claims.
• BOLA / IDOR — sequential ID enumeration and active adjacent-ID probing.
• BFLA / Privilege Escalation — admin endpoint probing and role/permission field leakage.
• Property Authorization — over-exposure and internal field leakage.
• Input Validation — CORS wildcard usage, dangerous HTTP methods, and debug endpoints.
• Rate Limiting & Resource Consumption — rate-limit header detection and oversized responses.
• Data Exposure — PII patterns, API key formats, and error/stack-trace leakage.
• Encryption — HTTPS redirect, HSTS, and cookie flags.
• SSRF — URL-accepting parameters and active IP-bypass probes.
• LLM / AI Security — 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep tiers.

The tool parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution and cross-references spec definitions against runtime findings. This helps identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. For authenticated scanning, Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie methods are supported. Domain verification is required so that only the domain owner can scan with credentials, and a strict header allowlist limits forwarded headers to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-*.

middlebrick scan https://api.example.com --auth-type bearer --token YOUR_TOKEN

The platform provides a web dashboard for scan management and score trends, a CLI for local runs, a GitHub Action for CI/CD gating, an MCP server for AI coding assistants, and an API client for custom integrations. Continuous monitoring options include scheduled rescans, diff detection, email alerts, and signed webhooks. Safety measures include read-only methods only, blocking private and metadata endpoints, and deletable data that is never used for model training.

• Web Dashboard — scan, view reports, track score trends, download compliance PDFs.
• CLI — middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output.
• GitHub Action — fails the build when the score drops below a threshold.
• MCP Server — scan from AI coding assistants such as Claude and Cursor.
• API client — programmatic access for custom workflows.

Free tier offers 3 scans per month and CLI access. Starter at ninety nine dollars per month supports fifteen APIs, monthly scans, dashboard access, email alerts, and the MCP server. Pro at four hundred ninety nine dollars per month adds continuous monitoring, up to one hundred APIs, GitHub Action gates, CI/CD integration, Slack and Teams alerts, compliance reports, and signed webhooks. Enterprise at two thousand dollars per month provides unlimited APIs, custom rules, SSO, audit logs, SLA, and dedicated support. Pricing is designed to align with startup growth while avoiding over-provisioning.