Baffle WAF
Product Positioning
Tagline options:
- "Baffle bots. Calm traffic." (playing on both meanings: confuse + quiet)
- "Confuse bots. Calm infrastructure."
- "Bewilder bots, silence the chaos"
Target market:
- Solo devs/bootstrapped startups (can't afford $249/mo Wafris/Cloudflare)
- Privacy-conscious/regulated orgs (data sovereignty requirements)
- Self-hosters (infrastructure control enthusiasts) Cost-sensitive scale-ups (outgrowing free tiers)
Business Model (Sidekiq-style)
Free (fully functional):
- Ruby/Rack edge agent (2-5ms response time)
- Local SQLite rules
- IP blocking, rate limiting, geoblocking
- Manual rule management
- Community support
Pro ($99-149/mo):
- Go edge agent (performance upgrade)
- SSO / multi-team
- Centralized hub with traffic analytics
- Automated rule generation
- Adaptive sampling (manual 0-100% toggle for hub load management)
- IP reputation feeds
- Priority support
Key Technical Decisions
Traffic categories:
- Blocked - Matched deny rule
- Allowed - Matched allow rule (fast-path for whitelisted IPs/APIs)
- Unmatched - No rules, passed through
OWASP approach:
- Don't try to compete with ModSecurity's full CRS
- Focus on network-layer threats (bots, rate limiting, IP reputation)
- Map to OWASP Top 10 where applicable (A05, A07, partial A01/A03)
- Position as complementary to app-layer security
Killer Feature: Performance Visibility
Always-on category timing:
Track latency by rule type (IP checks, rate limits, regex, etc.) Show real-time impact in dashboard Let users add rules and immediately see performance cost "The only WAF that shows you exactly what your rules cost"
Why this matters:
No other WAF does this well Solves "why is my site slow?" blame game Empowers users to make informed tradeoffs Natural deterrent against kitchen-sink rule sets
Implementation:
Start with category-level timing (always on, minimal overhead) Users can experiment: add rule → watch latency → remove if too expensive Can add detailed per-rule profiling later if needed
Terminology Settled
Rule pruning - removing inactive rules for performance Violation/pattern match - when traffic triggers a rule Adaptive sampling - hub telling edges to reduce telemetry load
Architecture Clarity
Self-hosted only (no SaaS hosting from you):
Edge agents do forward auth with local SQLite Push telemetry to hub every 10 seconds Hub analyzes and pushes rules back Max 20-second gap between violation and rule deployment