Comparison
Pliuz vs Building It Yourself
Two senior engineers can ship the first cut in 4-8 weeks. Here is what you trade for the time — and the dimensions where no internal build can ever match approval infrastructure.
| Dimension | Pliuz | Build it yourself |
|---|---|---|
Time to livePliuz | Same day. pip install + decorator + Slack OAuth = working approval flow in 10 minutes. | 4-8 weeks of 2 senior engineers for v1. Add 2-4 weeks for hardening before production traffic. |
Upfront costPliuz | Free tier (100 approvals/mo) or €149-€499/month at launch. No engineering time. | €30k-€60k in engineering salaries before the first approval flows. Opportunity cost of features not shipped not included. |
Audit trail integrityPliuz | SHA-256 hash-chained events, append-only at DB trigger level, verifiable via public RPC pliuz_verify_chain(). Defensible in a regulatory audit. | Whatever you ship. Most teams use plain INSERTs without integrity proofs — discovered to be weak during the first audit. Hash-chaining done right requires expertise in event ordering, race conditions, concurrent cron jobs. |
Maintenance burdenPliuz | We absorb Slack API breaking changes, new agent frameworks, regulator clarifications. Zero ongoing engineering cost for you. | Yours forever. Every Slack API change, every new framework you integrate, every regulator update is a sprint for your team — competing against feature work. |
EU AI Act compliance (Art. 12/14/26)Pliuz | Articles 12 (immutable logs), 14 (human oversight), 26 (deployer obligations) mapped to product features. Internally documented (NDA-shareable); independent counsel review pending. | You defend the system to the regulator. Article mapping happens after you have already shipped — usually during the audit itself, which is the worst time. |
Cross-tenant intelligencePliuz | Cross-tenant intelligence (roadmap, post-design-partners): planned quarterly AI Agent Incident Report — anonymized patterns across our customer base, surfaced as policy templates. Available once the tenant base supports honest aggregation. | You only see your own incidents. Pattern recognition starts at zero. The first time your agent does X, you find out the hard way. |
Per-event provenance for CISOPliuz | auto_approve_source field on every audit event: policy | tool_flag | human. CISO can prove exactly why each action went through without review. | Provenance is inferred from call-site context. Rarely surfaces as a structured field. CISOs spend audit time grep-ing logs. |
Insurance recognition (roadmap)Pliuz | Planned cyber-insurance carrier outreach (Hiscox, Beazley, Munich Re, Coalition, At-Bay) to recognize Pliuz-protected deployments for premium discount. On the strategic roadmap; not yet initiated. | Internal systems are not standardized — carriers cannot certify them. No premium reduction available. |
Total customizationDIY | Policies declarative (JSONLogic). Approver routing customizable. UI customizable on Enterprise. Cannot fork the control plane. | Total — every line of code is yours. But every line is also yours to write, maintain, and debug. |
Vendor riskTie | SDKs open-source (Apache 2.0). HTTP API. Self-serve Ed25519-signed JSONL export, verifiable offline with an open-source verifier. Schema documented for self-host migration if we disappear. | No vendor by definition. Just engineering risk and key-person risk — the engineer who built it may leave before documenting. |
Building internally gives you total customization over every line of code, and zero vendor risk by definition. If your team has the time and the expertise to absorb the audit chain design, the regulatory mapping, and the perpetual maintenance — and that time has no opportunity cost — building is rational.
Where no internal build can match Pliuz: (1) cross-tenant pattern intelligence from N customers — your DIY build sees one data point. (2) Cyber insurance carrier recognition on the roadmap — internal systems are not standardized enough to certify. (3) Vertical compliance packs (EU AI Act, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 42001) maintained as regulations evolve — your team writes them once per company; we write them once for the market.
Updated 2026-05-24. Spotted an error? Email founder@pliuz.com — we will fix it.
What you cannot build no matter how much time you have
These are not features — they are structural advantages that scale with the number of Pliuz customers. An internal build serves one company. Pliuz serves the category.
Patterns no single team can see (roadmap)
A planned quarterly AI Agent Incident Report will surface which policy patterns prevent which incident classes — anonymized across the Pliuz customer base, once it is large enough to aggregate honestly. Your internal build sees one data point: your own.
Reduced cyber premiums (roadmap)
Cyber insurance carriers cannot audit and certify a custom internal system. They can — and will — recognize standardized Pliuz deployments. Premium discounts on the roadmap with our first carrier partnership.
EU AI Act today, more on the roadmap
EU AI Act Article 12/14/26 is already mapped to product features (internally documented, independent counsel review pending). PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 42001 packs — pre-built policy templates and audit-query mappings — are on the roadmap. Your team writes them once for one company; we write them once for the market.
Costs less per month than one day of one senior engineer.
pip install pliuz → @gated decorator → first Slack approval in 10 minutes. Decide later if it is the right fit.
Read the docs