CGPulse's answer

Three things. First, an MCP server. Claude or any MCP client can run compliance scans, read findings, and trigger auto-remediation through natural language. No other CSPM ships this. Second, public self-serve pricing (€99/€299/month, Stripe checkout, no demo required) in a category where the norm is six-figure enterprise contracts. Third, every finding ships with Terraform and Bicep templates so teams apply fixes through their own change management, not a vendor UI.

ContractShield.dev's answer:

ContractShield is the only open-source middleware that enforces your OpenAPI contract at runtime — not just for documentation, but as a security policy.Most API security tools either scan for vulnerabilities (shift-left testing) or inspect payloads for known attack patterns (WAFs). ContractShield does neither. It sits inside your application and validates every request against what your API should do, not what attacks look like.

• Deny-by-default: if an endpoint isn't in your OpenAPI spec, it doesn't exist
• Schema-enforced auth: missing authentication is blocked regardless of whether your app forgot to check
• CEL invariants: custom business rules that execute on every request
• Zero infrastructure changes: standard middleware, 5-minute integration

The result: it catches business logic attacks — authentication bypasses, BOLA/IDOR, parameter tampering, prototype pollution — that produce perfectly valid HTTP requests every WAF in the world allows through.

CGPulse's answer

Price and speed to value. Wiz, Prisma Cloud, Orca typically start at $50k/year with six-week rollouts and sales gatekeepers. CGPulse is €99 to €299 per month with public pricing and a 60-second self-serve onboarding. You get 621 policy rules across 19 compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, CIS v8), the same category coverage, without enterprise overhead. For teams preparing their first audit, that's the difference between starting this quarter or next year.

ContractShield.dev's answer:

• vs. WAFs (Cloudflare, AWS WAF, Reblaze): WAFs can't see business logic. A GET /api/v1/users/456 from an attacker looks identical to a legitimate request. ContractShield understands the contract and blocks it.

• vs. API security platforms (Salt, Noname, Traceable): These are enterprise-grade, agent-based, and expensive. ContractShield is lightweight middleware you install in 5 minutes with zero infrastructure changes.

• vs. API testing tools (Akto, Escape.tech, Pynt): These find vulnerabilities before production. ContractShield blocks attacks in production — they're complementary, not competing.

• Open source core (Apache 2.0): No vendor lock-in, fully auditable code, free for production use. Security certifications include OWASP ASVS Level 1, OpenSSF Scorecard, and SLSA Build Level 1 provenance.

• Multi-platform from day one: Node.js, Python, and Java — covering ~80% of the API development market.

CGPulse's answer

Small and mid-size DevOps and platform teams, typically 10 to 200 people, running production workloads on Azure and AWS. Often they're preparing for their first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit, or their first customer security review. Many have tried open-source scanners (Prowler, ScoutSuite) and found the detection useful but the workflow missing. Others have been quoted by enterprise CSPM and found it outside their budget. CGPulse is built for the gap between those two.

ContractShield.dev's answer:

• Backend developers and API engineers building REST APIs who want runtime protection without adding infrastructure complexity

• DevSecOps teams looking to enforce API contracts as security policy in CI/CD and production

• CTOs and engineering leads at startups and mid-market companies who need API security beyond their WAF but can't justify six-figure enterprise platform contracts

• Regulated industries (fintech, healthtech, identity verification) where API business logic protection is a compliance requirement

• Teams already using OpenAPI specifications — ContractShield turns their existing documentation into an active security layer

CGPulse's answer

It started a year ago with a simple wish: one clear view of what was actually running across my Azure and AWS accounts. Not console-hopping, a real map. Once the map was working, the obvious next layer was security. Not "here's a VM" but "here's a VM and here's what's wrong with it".

What I kept wishing for was honest answers with honest fixes. Not a red light on a dashboard, but guidance you can act on. Real automation where it's safe, and clear "do this, then this" steps where it isn't.

So a small scanner became a rule engine. Rules became compliance frameworks. Findings grew actual Terraform, Bicep, and CLI you can run. Then AWS support landed on top.

CGPulse today is a multi-cloud governance platform built around three promises: Connect, Govern, Protect. Connect your Azure and AWS accounts and see every resource in one view. Govern with 621 policy rules across 19 compliance frameworks. Protect with auto-remediation where it's safe and IaC export where the change needs human review.

ContractShield.dev's answer:

ContractShield was born from years of penetration testing. Running API security assessments for clients, we kept finding the same pattern: organizations had invested in WAFs, API gateways, and network security — yet their APIs were wide open to business logic attacks.

Authentication bypasses. BOLA/IDOR. Parameter tampering. Prototype pollution. Every single one produced clean, valid HTTP requests that sailed through every layer of infrastructure security. The vulnerability wasn't in the payload — it was in the logic.

We realized the gap: infrastructure tools protect the transport layer, but nobody was protecting the contract layer — the actual business rules that define what an API should and shouldn't do.

So we built ContractShield as middleware that reads your OpenAPI specification and enforces it at runtime. Your API contract becomes your security policy. If it's not in the spec, it's blocked. If auth is required, it's enforced. If the schema says no, it means no.

We open-sourced the core under Apache 2.0 because API security shouldn't be a luxury reserved for enterprises with six-figure budgets. We continue to offer Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) alongside the product — because automated protection and expert assessment together provide the strongest security posture.

CGPulse's answer

.NET 10 with Blazor Server for the portal. Azure Cosmos DB for tenant and scan data, Azure App Service plus Azure Functions for the backend, Azure Service Bus for scan orchestration. Cloud scanning uses the Azure ARM SDK and AWS SDK directly. No agents, no proxies. Stripe for subscription billing. MCP server built on the ModelContextProtocol.AspNetCore library. Hosted entirely in Azure North Europe with per-tenant Cosmos partition keys.

ContractShield.dev's answer:

• TypeScript/Node.js — Core middleware engine and npm packages (@cshield/core, @cshield/pro)
• Python — FastAPI and Flask middleware adapters (PyPI: contractshield)
• Java/Spring Boot — Spring Boot starter for enterprise Java APIs (Maven Central)
• OpenAPI/Swagger — Contract parsing and schema validation engine
• CEL (Common Expression Language) — Policy engine for custom business rule invariants
• GitHub Actions — CI/CD, CodeQL security scanning, SLSA provenance, automated publishing
• Astro — Marketing site and documentation

ContractShield.dev's answer:

ContractShield PTaaS (our own penetration testing platform runs on ContractShield). Privacy is our moto, contact us for more information.