Alternatives to Burp Suite at Seed-stage startups

Seed-stage teams need an API security scanner that is low-friction, predictable, and quick to integrate. middleBrick provides a self-service, black-box scanner you submit a URL to, receiving a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings. It runs read-only requests, completes in under a minute, and supports any language or framework without agents or SDKs.

middleBrick maps findings to OWASP API Top 10 (2023), PCI-DSS 4.0, and SOC 2 Type II, while also helping you prepare for regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, NIST, and CCPA through alignment with security controls described in those frameworks. The scanner covers 12 categories, including authentication bypass, JWT misconfigurations, broken object level authorization, privilege escalation, sensitive data exposure, input validation, rate limiting, SSRF, inventory issues, unsafe consumption, and LLM/AI security. Each category surfaces findings relevant to audit evidence for compliance discussions.

• Authentication — multi-method bypass, JWT alg=none, expired tokens, missing claims, sensitive claims, security headers, WWW-Authenticate compliance.
• BOLA / IDOR — sequential ID enumeration, active adjacent-ID probing.
• BFLA / Privilege Escalation — admin endpoint probing, role/permission field leakage.
• Property Authorization — over-exposure, internal field leakage, mass-assignment surface.
• Input Validation — CORS wildcard with and without credentials, dangerous HTTP methods, debug endpoints.
• Rate Limiting & Resource Consumption — rate-limit header detection, oversized responses, unpaginated arrays.
• Data Exposure — PII patterns such as email, Luhn-validated cards, context-aware SSN, API key formats for AWS, Stripe, GitHub, Slack, and error/stack-trace leakage.
• Encryption — HTTPS redirect, HSTS, cookie flags, mixed content.
• SSRF — URL-accepting parameters and body fields, internal IP detection, active IP-bypass probes.
• Inventory Management — missing versioning, legacy path patterns, server fingerprinting.
• Unsafe Consumption — excessive third-party URLs, webhook/callback surface.
• LLM / AI Security — 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep tiers, including system prompt extraction, instruction override, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration, cost exploitation, encoding bypass, translation-embedded injection, few-shot poisoning, markdown injection, multi-turn manipulation, indirect prompt injection, token smuggling, tool-abuse, nested instruction injection, PII extraction.

middleBrick parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution, cross-referencing spec definitions against runtime findings to identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. For authenticated scans, supported methods include Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie. Domain verification is enforced via DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file so 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 Web Dashboard centralizes scans, report viewing, score trend tracking, and branded compliance PDF downloads. The CLI npm package supports commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action can gate CI/CD, failing the build when the score drops below your chosen threshold. The MCP Server enables scanning from AI coding assistants such as Claude and Cursor. For ongoing risk management, Pro tier provides scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, diff detection across scans, email alerts rate-limited to 1 per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks with auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures.

middleBrick operates read-only, never sending destructive payloads. Private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at three layers. Customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation; data is never sold or used for model training. The tool does not fix, patch, block, or remediate; it detects and reports with remediation guidance. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection, does not detect business logic vulnerabilities, and does not replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits. Pricing options include a free tier at $0 with 3 scans per month and CLI access, Starter at $99 per month for 15 APIs with monthly scans and dashboard, Pro at $499 per month for 100 APIs with continuous monitoring and CI/CD integration, and Enterprise at $2000+ per month for unlimited APIs, custom rules, SSO, audit logs, and dedicated support.