In-house SIEM, MDR retainer, or agentic SOC?

In-house SIEM: $150,000–$220,000 in tool cost plus $300,000–$450,000 in fully-loaded SOC analyst staff cost for 24/7 coverage. MDR retainer: $120,000–$300,000 per year. ManySignal: $85,000 subscription cost plus your existing team for escalation review. Most enterprises choose ManySignal because it delivers the detection quality of in-house plus the 24/7 coverage of MDR at a significantly lower total cost.

A traditional MDR gives you dedicated human analysts who are already familiar with your environment across thousands of customers. The trade-off: you lose visibility into your own alert data, lose control over detection rules, and pay for analyst labor whether incidents occur or not. ManySignal gives you the same 24/7 detection and response coverage with full data visibility and control — at lower cost, because AI handles the volume work.

Yes. Some customers use ManySignal for detection, triage, and automated response — and use an MDR for complex investigation and incident management on escalated cases. In this model, ManySignal delivers triaged escalations to the MDR's analyst team, dramatically improving the quality of cases the MDR receives.

The primary risk is incident types the AI has not encountered before. ManySignal mitigates this by: escalating any case with confidence below threshold to on-call immediately, including the full evidence package with the escalation, and continuously improving detection coverage. Customers who have replaced MDR with ManySignal report no degradation in incident detection rates — and significantly faster MTTR for detected incidents.

When the triage agent's confidence falls below the configured threshold — typically below 60 — the case escalates to an analyst immediately with the current evidence and the specific questions that remain unanswered. The analyst never receives a blank escalation; they receive the agent's partial work and the exact gaps requiring human judgment.