SigWise vs. building on an LLM API
Calling an LLM with "is this user a scammer? here are their messages" works in a notebook. In production, the prompt is the easy part. This page lists what else you would build, so you can decide whether it is worth it.
What you would build
| Piece | Doing it yourself | In SigWise |
|---|---|---|
| Event storage | A table of events per user, with retention and limits | POST /v1/objects/{id}/events. See Ingesting events. |
| History that fits a context window | Truncation or summarization of long histories, kept up to date | Recent events plus a rolling summary of everything before |
| Debouncing | Coalesce a burst of messages into one call, or pay per message | Built in: events a few seconds apart share one analysis |
| Typed, reliable outputs | JSON schemas, parsing, retries on malformed output, calibrated probabilities | Three typed signal shapes with probabilities and confidence |
| Changing questions | Prompt changes, deploys, and re-running old users | Edit a signal with one call; backfill existing objects |
| Queues and priorities | Workers, rate limits, and keeping bulk re-runs from delaying live traffic | Live traffic is served ahead of bulk work |
| Inline checks | A synchronous path with its own timeouts | "wait": true. See Direct moderation. |
| Querying answers | Store answers, index them, write a query layer | GET /v1/objects?q=is_scammer >= 90. See Search. |
| Notifications | Webhooks with signing, retries and a dead-letter queue; Slack and email alerts that don't repeat | Webhooks and rules |
| Cost tracking | Token accounting per feature and per customer | Usage by day, model, signal and source. See Billing. |
| Console | An internal tool to inspect users and answers | Included |
When building it yourself makes sense
- You need a model or deployment SigWise doesn't offer, such as a model you host on your own hardware.
- Scoring users is your core product and you want to own every part of it.
- Your volume is large enough that a dedicated team is cheaper than any per-analysis price.
When SigWise makes sense
- You want answers this week, not a quarter from now.
- Trust and safety, fraud or lead scoring supports your product rather than being the product.
- You want non-engineers to change the questions without a deploy.
Analyses are billed at their model cost, with no subscription or minimum, so the comparison is mostly about engineering time. See Billing and usage.
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