Caisson vs building it in-house
Building the compliance substrate yourself is real work: months of it. Here is the honest build-vs-buy line, and where owning Caisson's source fits.
Which should you use?
The real default competitor is your own backlog. Building the compliance substrate yourself means writing fail-closed RLS, a tamper-evident audit chain, WORM evidence storage, and an evidence-pack generator from scratch: the load-bearing parts a regulated-SaaS team has to get exactly right the first time; the industry cost of a first SOC 2 built from zero is about $80k and 6–9 months. Caisson ships those controls as source you own, wired and CI-tested from day one, for a one-time perpetual license, and the Apache-2.0 base means you still own and can read every line. Build it if the domain is unusual enough that no library fits; own Caisson if you'd otherwise rebuild what already exists, tested.
What building it in-house is
The do-it-yourself path. Facts below were read from caisson.sh/build-vs-buy on 2026-07-07.
- The load-bearing controls to build from scratch: fail-closed RLS, a tamper-evident audit chain, WORM evidence storage, and an evidence-pack generator.
- The industry cost of a first SOC 2 built from scratch is about $80k and 6–9 months, an industry figure, not a Caisson quote.
- Even the narrowest slice (wiring single-DB tenant_id isolation with Postgres RLS, schema, and tests, before WORM, field crypto, or evidence generation) runs about 40 engineering hours by one outside estimate (Appycodes' 2026 write-up of its own multi-tenant builds).
- Retrofitting RLS, WORM, and an audit chain into a live database is months more than greenfielding them.
- You still need an audit and your organizational controls: no codebase makes you compliant on its own.
An honest comparison
Where building it in-house has a capability, it is marked. Caisson is the compliance and tenant-isolation substrate; building it in-house wins the rows it wins.
| Detail | Caisson | building it in-house |
|---|---|---|
| Exact fit to your domain model | partial | |
| No software license cost | — | |
| Wired and CI-tested on day one | — | |
| Fail-closed Postgres RLS + automated cross-tenant isolation tests | you build it | |
| WORM evidence store + append-only hash-chained audit trail | you build it | |
| SOC 2 / HIPAA / EU AI Act evidence packs + OSCAL export | you build it | |
| Maintained + framework-mapping updates | — | |
| You own and can read every line |
What building it in-house is genuinely better at
A comparison that only flatters one side isn't worth reading. Here is what this kit does well.
Building it yourself means the controls fit your domain precisely, with no unused surface, and you understand every line because you wrote it. For a team with the security-engineering time and an unusual model, that control is a genuine advantage.
There is nothing to buy and no third party in the loop. If your constraint is a zero software budget and full autonomy over the implementation, rolling your own is an honest, valid choice.
Where Caisson draws the line
The compliance and tenant-isolation substrate a launch kit leaves to you.
A missed RLS policy is a silent cross-tenant leak; an audit log that isn't truly append-only isn't evidence. Caisson ships these with isolation tests that assert a cross-tenant read fails and a hash-chain verifier that detects tamper, running in CI on every push, not just the day you wrote them.
Caisson isn't the opposite of owning your code. The Base substrate is Apache-2.0 and you get the source: you are buying the months of load-bearing work already done and tested, then extending it yourself, not renting a black box.
Which should you pick?
You have the security-engineering time, an unusual domain no library fits, and compliance is far enough out that months of build cost is acceptable.
You'd otherwise spend months rebuilding fail-closed RLS, WORM, a hash-chained audit trail, and OSCAL export that already exist, tested, and you still want to own and read the source.
Own the load-bearing substrate from Caisson and build the domain-specific controls yourself on top: the Apache-2.0 base and full source mean it is not all-or-nothing.
One-time, own the source.
Caisson is a one-time perpetual license — the price never recurs, and it includes 12 months of updates from your purchase date, renewable per entitlement afterward at 40% of list per year. The Base substrate is Apache-2.0; the compliance modules are commercial.
Compliance bundle
$1,649, one-time. Fail-closed RLS, WORM, the audit chain, evidence packs, and the framework and signing carves — the whole substrate this comparison is about.
À la carte
Take a single module from $49 — audit-worm, field-crypto, or compliance-core on their own, onto your existing Postgres app.
Everything bundle
$2,259 covers every bundle and every à-la-carte module, plus the open base, in one purchase.
Common questions.
Isn't building it myself cheaper than buying Caisson?
If I buy Caisson, do I still own my code?
Does either option make me compliant?
Ship the compliant backend.
Explore the Compliance bundle, browse every module in the marketplace, or read another comparison.