Pricing alternative to Kong

When teams priced out of Kong evaluate alternatives, list the published monthly rate and the cost per additional unit. MiddleBrick Starter is 99 dollars per month for 15 APIs, and each additional API beyond that tier is not itemized separately in published pricing. MiddleBrick Pro is 499 dollars per month for 100 APIs, with 7 dollars added per additional API. In contrast, Kong’s listed price often omits add-ons for gateway clustering, analytics, and premium support, which can meaningfully raise the effective rate at scale.

Total cost of ownership extends beyond sticker price. Factor in engineering time for deployment, configuration, and ongoing maintenance. Because this scanner is read-only and requires no agents or SDK changes, deployment costs are limited to initial onboarding and periodic review. For teams without dedicated platform staff, that reduction in operational overhead favors tools that integrate cleanly into existing pipelines rather than introducing new infrastructure to manage.

Consider also compliance and risk exposure. A security scanning capability that maps findings to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023) can reduce the cost of audit preparation and potential incidents. Balancing the subscription rate against these avoided costs and the potential impact of undiscovered vulnerabilities provides a clearer comparison than headline rates alone.

Security operations teams need scanning that integrates into existing workflows without introducing new complexity. This product provides a web dashboard to view reports and track score trends, a CLI for local or scripted use, and a GitHub Action to gate CI/CD when the score drops below a chosen threshold. An MCP server enables scanning from AI coding assistants, and a programmable API supports custom integrations.

Continuous monitoring options on the Pro tier include scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, with diff detection across scans to highlight new findings, resolved findings, and score drift. Email alerts are rate-limited to one per hour per API, and webhooks are HMAC-SHA256 signed, with auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures to reduce noisy or unreliable notification loops.

Authentication support covers Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie, with a domain verification gate that requires DNS TXT record or HTTP well-known file proof of ownership. Only a limited set of headers is forwarded, ensuring that credentials are handled predictably during scans.

The scanner covers 12 categories aligned to OWASP API Top 10 (2023), including Authentication bypass, BOLA and IDOR, BFLA and privilege escalation, property authorization over-exposure, and input validation issues such as CORS wildcard usage and dangerous HTTP methods. It also detects rate-limiting headers, data exposure patterns like PII and API key formats, encryption misconfigurations, SSRF indicators, and inventory management gaps.

For AI-related risks, it runs 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep scan tiers, targeting system prompt extraction, instruction override, jailbreak techniques, data exfiltration attempts, token smuggling, and other LLM security concerns. These capabilities help teams identify surface-level weaknesses in public-facing APIs and AI integrations.

It is important to understand what the tool does not do. It does not fix, patch, block, or remediate issues. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, which requires intrusive payloads outside its scope. It does not detect business logic vulnerabilities, blind SSRF relying on out-of-band infrastructure, or replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits. Being explicit about these limits supports more accurate risk assessment and prevents over-reliance on automated results.

The product parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents with recursive $ref resolution, then cross-references spec definitions against runtime findings. This helps identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields in the spec, deprecated operations, and missing pagination that may indicate scalability or exposure issues.

Authenticated scanning is available at Starter tier and above. Supported methods include Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic authentication, and Cookies. Before credentials are accepted, a domain verification gate must pass, ensuring that only the domain owner can run scans with those credentials. A strict header allowlist limits forwarded headers to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers, reducing configuration mistakes during testing.

OpenAPI analysis can highlight mismatches between declared security requirements and actual runtime behavior, such as missing rate-limiting expectations or overly permissive paths. When combined with continuous monitoring, these comparisons offer a practical way to track security posture over time.

Customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation. The service does not sell data and does not use scan data for model training, which can be an important consideration for organizations with strict privacy requirements.

For compliance positioning, the tool maps findings directly to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). For other frameworks, it supports audit evidence collection and helps prepare documentation by surfacing findings relevant to controls described in HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, NIST, CCPA, NIS2, DORA, FedRAMP, DPDP, APPI, PDPA, PIPEDA, PIPA, UK DPA, LGPD, SOX, GLBA, and FERPA. It does not claim certification, guaranteed compliance, or adherence to any regulatory standard.

Finally, the scanner operates as a read-only tool. Destructive payloads are never sent, private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers, and the design intentionally avoids claiming capabilities it does not possess.