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Reldavi vs building it yourself
The most common competitor, and the only one that is never evaluated honestly — because the first version takes an afternoon and the bill arrives years later.
Build it yourself if
These are good reasons and they are more common than vendors admit.
- The trail is for you. Internal debugging, a support desk answering "what happened to this order", a changelog nobody audits. An afternoon and a table is the right amount of work for that.
- You have a handful of entities and they are not going to grow. Coverage is the part that decays, and it does not decay if there is nothing to add.
- Your obligations are satisfied by your database's own features. SQL Server temporal tables and PostgreSQL triggers are real answers to real questions, and they cost nothing extra.
Buy it if
The pattern is always the same: the first version is cheap, and every expensive part arrives after somebody outside the team reads it.
- You cannot say what it does not cover. This is the one that ends arguments. A hand-written trail covers the entities somebody remembered, and nobody wrote down which. A record with unknowable gaps cannot be corrected and cannot be relied on.
- It has to keep working while it is not looked at. A producer that stops reporting is invisible until the audit. Reldavi watches for exactly that.
- Personal data ends up in it. The naive version stores the value and the compliance review finds it two years later, in a table with seven years of retention.
- Somebody has to prove nothing was edited. A hash column beside the row is defeated by deleting the row. Doing this properly is a Merkle tree, a chain and an external anchor — which is a month of work for something that produces no feature.
- It will be rewritten at the next company. By somebody making the same five decisions, for the same reasons, badly, under the same deadline.
What the afternoon does not include
| Reldavi | Building it yourself | |
|---|---|---|
| Capture every entity | Automatic, including ones added later | The ones you remembered |
| Before and after values | Per property, only what changed | Usually a JSON blob of everything |
| Masking personal data | Before it is buffered | Usually discovered later |
| Proof it was not edited | Sealed daily roots, chained, anchorable | A hash column, defeated by DELETE |
| Who read it | Recorded like a change | Almost never built |
| Retention per resource type | Enforced and evidenced | One number, or none |
| Somebody non-technical reading it | Dashboard, timelines, exports | A SQL query and a screenshot |
| Cost | Free to 100,000 events a month | Two quarters, then maintenance forever |
None of this says do not build it. It says price the whole thing, not the afternoon — and be honest that the parts you would skip are the parts an auditor asks about.
Price it properly
If the list above is work you were going to do anyway, five minutes is all it takes to find out whether this does it for you.