How it works
Position first.
Everything else follows.
Step one
A few facts are read. Each one settles something.
Folean does not ask you how far along you are. People are kind to themselves, and the answer would be worthless. It reads what is already there. These are the facts that carry the most weight, because each one closes a question that opinion cannot.
Were the changes to your database written down, or made by clicking?
If every change to how your information is stored was written down as a step, that structure can be rebuilt anywhere: on a new machine, after a failure, or for a second customer. If the changes were made by clicking through a dashboard, the structure exists in exactly one place and nobody can recreate it. Including you.
Technical name: schema migrations held in version control
Does the protection actually work, or does it merely exist?
A rule that is written down but switched off protects nothing, and from the outside the two look identical. The difference is settled by trying it: asking for somebody else's data as a stranger and seeing what comes back. Present and enforced are not the same thing, and only one of them is worth anything.
Technical name: row-level security, proven by a denied read
Is there information inside that belongs to someone else?
The moment one other person's details are in there, a whole class of actions stops being available. Wiping it and starting again was free yesterday. Today it is somebody's lost order, and no amount of care afterwards brings it back.
Technical name: production data containing non-owner rows
Has a backup ever actually been restored?
A backup nobody has ever restored is a belief, not a safeguard. Backups fail quietly, in ways that only surface on the one day you need them. The only thing that settles this is a restore that produced a working copy, and a record of how long it took.
Technical name: verified restore, with a measured recovery time
Was a password or key ever saved into the project, even once?
Deleting the file does not undo this. The earlier version stays in the project's history, readable by anybody who has ever had a copy of it, forever. The only real fix is to replace the key itself, which is why this is worth knowing before anyone asks you about it.
Technical name: secret present in version control history, rotation required
Step two, and the rule that matters most
Your position is the highest signal met. Never an average.
There are ten positions between an idea and a company. A project sits at the furthest one it has genuinely reached, even if it reached that one by accident and is missing everything before it.
Take a project with no way to sign in, no tests, and a half-finished checkout. One real customer put their phone number into it last week. An average of everything would call this an early prototype, and it would feel about right.
It is not right. That phone number belongs to a person, and it is real regardless of what else is missing. The obligations that come with holding it arrived the day it did, not on the day the rest of the work is finished.
So the rule is not a preference. An average tells you the comfortable thing at exactly the moment being comfortable is most expensive.
The same project, placed two ways
- Highest signal met: Real people are using it
- Someone other than you has put their data inside. From here on, wiping the database or removing a column directly are no longer available, to you or to us. They are refused rather than warned about.
- Position 6 of 10 · T3
- Where an average would have put it: How it looks and how it feels
- Comfortable, and wrong in the only direction that hurts. It would have told you it was still safe to wipe everything and start again.
- Position 3 of 10 · T1
Step three
Then there are three things you can do about it.
You never have to buy the next one to keep the last. Reading is free and stays free.
Read and prove
FreeAny project, at any point, including one that does not exist yet.
Point Folean at what you have. It reads the facts, tells you where you stand and what that means, and shows the evidence behind every single line. If something could not be checked, it says so instead of guessing. No account, nothing stored.
Close the gates
BuildBefore real people are using it.
Your position names a short list of things that must be true before anyone else arrives. Folean does that work with you and proves each one afterwards. This is the cheapest moment in the life of your product to fix any of it.
Keep it true
OperateFrom the moment real data exists.
Position is not a photograph. Every change can move it, and things that were proven last month quietly stop being true. Folean re-checks as the project moves and tells you the moment something slips, while it is still small.