Security and privacy decision
Authex
A competent developer can build a useful scanner/monitor (the core monitoring and workspace read-only posture) in a few weeks, but Authex's value relies on its large proprietary corpus and autonomous enforcement features which are hard to replicate.
Visit website↗$19/mo
$228/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off120 h to build
$150/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 9 seats.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Periodically fetch public DNS and protocol endpoints for a domain, evaluate six email-protection signals, surface findings in a dashboard, and (optionally) connect read-only to Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 to collect mailbox/workspace posture data.
What it still won’t have
- Authex's 4M+ publicly observed domains research corpus and historical internet-scale observations
- Autonomous enforcement agent that advances policies and performs managed changes
- MSP-focused multi-customer billing, roles and per-customer isolation polish
- Built-in auditor evidence packs mapped to frameworks
What remains hard
- Proprietary data
Authex tracks 4M+ publicly observed domains across 189 countries. Corpus data is separate from customer usage.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 9 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a domain email-protection scanner and monitor service using Node.js (Express), Postgres, Redis, and a worker queue (BullMQ). Core features in scope: (1) DNS and protocol fetchers for SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, TLS-RPT and BIMI; (2) scheduled workers that run scans and store raw results and a computed protection score in Postgres; (3) read-only OAuth connectors for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to collect mailbox/posture metadata; (4) a simple policy store that records desired state, change history and exports an auditor evidence ZIP; (5) a web UI to view domains, scores, findings and download evidence; (6) tests for workers, API and scoring logic and basic error handling and retries. Out of scope: autonomous enforcement that writes DNS or makes mailbox configuration changes, multi-tenant MSP billing polish, and building a proprietary internet-scale corpus. Provide logging, retries, exponential backoff for external calls, and unit/integration tests.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 2 cited sources+1
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score57
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 2
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAuthex | Autonomous Business Email Security (product & features)
- official pricingAuthex Pricing
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
