alt Hacker NewsLaunch HN: Prized (YC S26) – Let non-engineer staff build secure internal tools
Hi HN, we're Marinos and Hudson, founders of Prized (https://prized.dev)! Prized lets non-engineer employees describe the internal tool they need and get a full-stack app, wired to their company’s data and deployed behind the company’s sign-in, without them ever juggling API keys or connectors.
Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=730MuYOfZTY
The way Prized provides security is by limiting what the agent can reach at the network layer and by keeping credentials out of the sandbox entirely. The sandbox never holds any keys or connector secrets, it only uses scoped session tokens that are stored as opaque placeholders. The real values are swapped into the request headers on our egress proxy. When production data is connected, the sandbox's network policy is set to deny by default so the only path out is via the proxy. Any call the agent makes to an external connector is reviewed by an LLM judge to prevent dangerous operations.
Prized is meant for the internal workflows that start as notebooks or spreadsheets but never become real tools because engineering has more important things to work on. One customer’s data scientist pasted in his personal fraud-detection notebook with hardcoded thresholds and all. After a few prompts, it became a published risk console connected to the company’s data with those thresholds turned into UI controls. Earlier today, we got off a call with them and most of their company is using it.
To do this, you need to give people the freedom to build without having unaudited access to company systems. We allow admins to scope data to specific users or teams and data access is recorded in an audit log. Each tool is built with its own Postgres schema and role, with queries running via an authenticated SQL gateway as that role.
We think Prized sits between products like Lovable and Retool. Lovable makes it easy to generate and host software, but it isn’t designed around distribution with permissions. Retool generally assumes that a technical builder is creating an app for an end user.
Prized treats internal tools as shared objects. Anyone in the workspace can see what others have built, fork, and connect different data. For example, one customer’s marketing lead built a promotional analytics tool. A data scientist at the same company then forked it and added confidence intervals with the existing tool as a starting base. This way workspaces become libraries of tools that people can reuse.
We’re live and self-serve. Our free tier includes 2 tool builds/month and our Teams tier is $100/month. The Enterprise tier is custom and supports personalized features like on-prem deployment.
We're still working out the right boundary between control and freedom. If you've built internal tools before we'd appreciate your feedback!
Comments
I like the security-first posture. What's your view on how foundation models will or won't evolve into this space? Like will CC steamroll this in 2 years when it can natively build connectors and run them from within the desktop app? Not saying you won't have an ongoing edge, I just want to understand the thesis better so I can learn. Cool product!
I’m playing with this exact concept but going down the path of a Claude code plugin that is optimized for configuring lowdefy apps because of that framework’s unique approach where you don’t write code you generate yaml configs that then drive the rendering of an app. So far it’s working pretty well, still pressure testing it. The audit control and permissions management you have is great, especially around the connectors. Nice job!
Me and my co-founder are building something similar but it started out as a tool to help build Lovable style prototypes for your existing product. Think Product Managers building an idea without having to figure out how to install git, VS Code, 17 other tools and then try share a URL.
Initial talks with customers resonated more with the internal tooling idea though. It's flexible enough to support both.
We're earlier along than this product though so there's a fair few wrinkles in our product.
Congratulations with your launch! I suspect the product market fit for tools like these will be huge. Especially for SMBs with just 10s of employees in the office, lacking the budget for SAP consultants. However I think the agent creating an app is adding unnecessary complexity. Users want answers or insight in data, why build an app for that if the agent can provide it directly?
Awesome launch and good pricing. We built an equivalent version in our org that takes HTML/JSX files and stores/serves them like an S3 bucket would. Works fabulous and we considered turning it into a SaaS product, met a real need in our org. Wishing you guys the very best of luck!!
Very cool. What model is used for the judge? We use setoku for Claude-built internal tooling but the design doesn’t allow writes so that there’s no inference cost on the server. Having the judge check for danger is a neat design.
I did build a very similar product putting emphasis on integrations and security. It was tough to churn anyone out from Replit, Lovable and then CC and Codex.
When I talked to Lovable team, they told me Lovable is used primarily for prototyping, not internal tools and they are having a rough time trying to change the use case.
Hope my experience helps!
nice this is awesome, what i've been building internally for a while now. lovable-esque internal platform with an agentic chat building experience, preview window, our internal auth, internal standards, sandboxed agent devcontainers on k8s. Even down to the shared experience -- these are shared tools for everbody, team ownership structure, not individual. easily forkable, auto-genned product docs etc etc. Hope you can monetize it! Look into private endpoint connectivity for big corps that need the internal access but don't want to self host.
I like this a lot. Do you handle scenarios where the data and context live in a data warehouse (Snowflake, etc)?
There are a lot of operational needs that exist downstream from dbt models that combine data from the various source systems.
You can do this in lovable too now. But i dont think it gets used a lot. I think it is not very unique, i have seen bunch of providers, some are selling ai workers, some are selling internal tools in different shape and form.
I think the moat for internal tools is not where you think it is. Also, i see self host option, it is a nightmare too, no one will do it just for internal tools now. It was valid before AI era.
I am also seeing non engineering staff actually building tools with claudecode, paas like railway and stuff. People have become more efficient with engineer tools.
Demo looks cool, congrats on the ship! Probably missed but is it possible to externally share/view the built artifact outside of prized?
Seems like Superblocks
Congratulations on the launch. I’m very bullish on this concept of allowing SMB’s and startups to roll their own software and internal tools. Many many moons ago I built an entire inventory tracking and CRM for a very small company in PHP (circa 2006). It ran the entire company with orders, customers, devices, and revenue. It was a monstrous app, and took forever. Today, could be build in a matter of days and much better.
Along the same lines. I got so fed up with Quickbooks self employed (god awful software and company) for my own business I wrote a replacement using Cursor. It tracks expenses (categorizing each in proper IRS categories) and estimating quarterly taxes. Uses Plaid to pull in business bank accounts and credit cards and has income and expense reports. It’s 100x better than Quickbooks.
> Any call the agent makes to an external connector is reviewed by an LLM judge to prevent dangerous operations.
A few basic questions: how reliable is this judge since it’s based on an LLM? What additional measures can an admin or someone with more technical knowledge take to tighten this further if needed? Are the rules in or used by this judge visible to the users or an admin?