Backplain vs Building It Yourself: what's actually different.
A capable IT team can wire up an LLM proxy. The question is what it actually costs once the AI Firewall, the audit log, and the multi-model UI are in scope.
| Building It Yourself | Backplain Business | |
|---|---|---|
| Capital outlay | $60K–$500K (GPU infrastructure) | $0 |
| Annual operating cost | $150K–$300K | From $1,548/mo (10 seats) |
| Internal engineering time | Ongoing | — |
| AI Firewall | Build from scratch | Patent-pending, included |
| Multi-model UI | Build from scratch | Included |
| Audit logs | Build from scratch | Included |
| Time to first value | Quarters | Same day |
| Compliance posture | Whatever your team builds and attests to — SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, CMMC are all your scope | SOC 2 Type II in progress (target Q3 2026); HIPAA BAA available on Enterprise; NIST 800-53 / 800-171 (CMMC L2 baseline) controls mapped; FedRAMP pursuing — not yet listed on the Marketplace |
An internal build is the right answer for a narrow set of organizations: those with a dedicated AI engineering team, a multi-quarter budget, and a strategic reason to own the stack end-to-end.
For everyone else — including most regulated SMBs — buying a managed platform with an AI Firewall, audit logs, and multi-model coverage is the lower-cost, lower-risk path. Backplain Sovereign Compute exists for organizations that want dedicated hardware without building the platform on top of it.
The line item most internal builds underestimate is what happens after launch. An LLM proxy stitches together a long supply chain — Python and Node runtimes, vector DBs, an inference server, OS packages, container base images, and the wrapper code your team wrote on top — and every one of those publishes CVEs on its own clock. For a regulated buyer, that means a 24/7 vulnerability-management rotation, an SBOM you can hand to an auditor, expedited patch SLAs when something like a remote-code-execution bug drops in a transitive dependency, and a security review every time a frontier model deprecates an endpoint or changes its safety posture. None of that work shows up in the build estimate, but all of it shows up in the SOC 2 audit. Backplain absorbs that work centrally — patches, CVE response, dependency upgrades, model deprecations, and the audit evidence behind them — so your security team isn't on call for someone else's CVE feed.