What to build
Build applications with real rules, workflows and accountability.
Cisely is designed for multi-tenant products, approval workflows, auditable systems and internal tools that have outgrown spreadsheets. Model the controls with the application instead of adding them after the first release.
Before you build anything
Start with the controls most applications add later.
Declare tenancy, authorisation, validation, audit and API behaviour in the application model. Cisely validates those declarations together and generates the corresponding implementation assets.
- Tenant isolation
- Row-level security and database roles derived from the model, so one customer cannot read another — enforced in the database, not remembered in a query.
- Authorization
- Policies declared against operations. The requirement belongs to the operation itself, so a new caller cannot route around it.
- Validated input
- Field specs and invariants checked wherever a value crosses a trust boundary, rather than at whichever handler someone remembered.
- An audit trail
- Domain events recorded as facts as the system runs, because the record of what happened is derived rather than added later.
- Migrations
- Derived from the model and not hand-written, so the schema and the description of it cannot drift apart.
- An API, contracts and typed clients
- The HTTP surface, its OpenAPI description and the clients that call it, all generated from the same source.
Common application types
Where Cisely is a strong fit.
Fit depends more on system structure than industry: what data must remain separate, how work moves, which rules apply and what evidence stakeholders will need. Each type below links to the modelling concepts behind it.
Multi-tenant products
Many customers, one system, and nothing of theirs may touch anything of anyone else’s.
The shape most software businesses are. Tenancy here has two levels that nest — how your customers are separated from each other, and how their users are separated inside each one — and both are modelled rather than remembered. The separation is derived into the database, so it holds for a query nobody has written yet.
Workflow and approval systems
Work that moves through states, waits on people, and must not lose its place.
Anything where a request is raised, reviewed, approved, escalated or rejected — and where the interesting failures are the half-finished ones. These are modelled as state machines with their guards declared, so a step that cannot legally happen does not compile rather than failing at two in the morning.
Systems that have to be answerable
Somebody will ask you to prove it, and "we tested it" is not the answer they want.
Where a control has to be demonstrated rather than described — to a regulator, an auditor, a customer’s security review. Obligations are declared against the model and graded, and the report is produced from the substrate rather than assembled by hand the week before the audit.
Internal systems that outgrew the spreadsheet
The thing five people depend on that lives in a sheet, a form and somebody’s inbox.
Operations tooling, back-office systems, the process that runs on glue. These are usually not hard — they are just never worth a team, so they stay fragile. When the description is the system, the thing that was never worth building becomes worth building, and it arrives with the same floor as everything else.
However many of you there are
The floor does not know how big your team is.
A multi-tenant product is the same shape at four people and at four hundred. What changes with size is how much of the business you have modelled — not which properties the system comes with. So a team of four ships with isolation, authorization, audit and derived migrations on the first afternoon, because those fall out of the description rather than being earned by a platform group. And a bank gets the same floor, with the evidence to show a regulator.
That is the whole trade this platform makes. Speed is normally borrowed against the future — you go fast now and pay for it in the rewrite. Here the thing that makes it fast is the same thing that makes it hold.