Launch HN: Prized (YC S26) – Let non-engineer staff build secure internal tools

Every company has that one spreadsheet or Jupyter notebook doing load-bearing work nobody officially approved. Prized, a new YC S26 startup from founders Marinos and Hudson, wants to turn those orphaned scripts into proper internal tools without routing them through an engineering backlog that never gets shorter.

The pitch is simple: an employee describes what they need in plain language, and Prized generates a full-stack app wired to the company's actual data, sitting behind existing single sign-on. One customer's data scientist reportedly pasted in a personal fraud-detection notebook, hardcoded thresholds included, and after a handful of prompts it became a shared risk console with those thresholds exposed as adjustable UI controls. The founders say most of that company now uses it.

The harder problem, and the one Prized seems to actually care about, is keeping this from turning into a security nightmare. The build sandbox never touches real credentials. It works with scoped session tokens that are just placeholders; actual secrets get swapped in later at an egress proxy, and any outbound call to a connector passes through an LLM judge meant to catch dangerous requests before they happen. Network access defaults to deny, so nothing leaves the sandbox except through that proxy. Each generated tool also gets its own Postgres schema and role, with queries running through an authenticated SQL gateway, and admins can scope who sees what, with every data access logged.

What sets Prized apart from something like Lovable or Retool is the social layer bolted on top. Tools aren't private projects; they're shared objects other employees in the workspace can see, fork, and remix. The example the founders give is a marketing analytics tool that a data scientist later forked to add confidence intervals, without starting from scratch. The bet is that a workspace full of these forkable tools becomes something closer to an internal software library than a pile of one-off scripts.

Pricing starts free for two tool builds a month, with a $100/month Teams tier and a custom Enterprise plan for things like on-prem deployment. The founders are candid that they're still tuning the line between letting people build freely and making sure that freedom doesn't turn into unaudited access to sensitive systems.