Alternatives to Apigee at Series A startups

At Series A, engineering teams manage limited staff and budget while needing to demonstrate security to investors and early enterprise customers. The risk profile for public APIs is high because external exposure is growing faster than internal controls. A scanner that runs without agents or code changes can surface misconfigurations across the stack in under a minute. Black-box analysis covers authentication mechanisms, authorization boundaries, input validation, and data exposure without requiring privileged build environments.

middleBrick maps findings to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). For PCI-DSS 4.0, findings related to authentication bypass, sensitive data exposure, and insecure transmission align with relevant control areas. SOC 2 Type II audit evidence is supported through scan reports that show ongoing configuration checks and change detection. OWASP API Top 10 coverage includes checks for broken object level authorization, excessive data exposure, and injection vectors, enabling teams to validate controls without intrusive testing.

With a Starter tier subscription, authenticated scanning adds coverage for APIs that require Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, or cookies. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file, ensuring only the domain owner can submit credentials. The scanner forwards a restricted set of headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-*, while avoiding unnecessary data leakage. This approach enables more thorough checks of user flows without exposing internal logic or source code.

The scanner detects issues across 12 categories aligned to OWASP API Top 10, including authentication weaknesses, IDOR and BOLA, privilege escalation, data exposure patterns such as PII and API keys, rate limiting gaps, SSRF indicators, and LLM security probes. It analyzes OpenAPI specs and cross-references definitions against runtime behavior. The tool does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, does not exploit business logic, does not detect blind SSRF, and is not a replacement for a human pentester in high-stakes audits. Remediation guidance is provided, but no automatic patching or blocking is performed.

Results are centralized in a web dashboard with trend tracking and downloadable compliance PDFs. The CLI supports on-demand scans via middlebrick scan <url>, producing JSON or text output for automation. A GitHub Action can gate CI/CD pipelines based on score thresholds. The MCP server enables integration with AI coding assistants. Pro tier adds scheduled rescans, diff detection, email alerts, signed webhooks, and Slack or Teams notifications. Enterprise tiers support unlimited APIs, custom rules, SSO, audit logs, SLAs, and dedicated support.