Six months ago, we encountered a problem with no clear solution. We were building an AI agent inside a startup. When customer conversations were flowing in, we started looking for privacy tools that could keep up.
Everything we found fell into one of three buckets:
- Enterprise privacy platforms: Powerful, but priced at $50K/month, required a 3–6 month sales cycle, and expected a compliance team plus infra support. Great for a Fortune 100, way out of budget for startups.
- Build it yourself: Realistically, 6+ months of engineering time plus ongoing maintenance forever. Every founder we talked to who went down this route eventually regretted it.
- Ship without protection: Which no one actually wants to admit is an option, but many take when pressured by deadlines.
Somewhere in the middle of this, we caught ourselves looking for a simple, affordable way to mask data before it hits AI systems.
Why We Started Building Protecto
Talk to 10 founders building AI features and you hear the same pain points keep surfacing:
- “We’re building an AI agent.”
- “We’re dealing with sensitive user data.”
- “Enterprise privacy tools want $50K+/month.”
- “That doesn’t work for us.”
The real pain points
- Customer conversations flowing through logs unmasked
- Vector databases storing raw PII
- Fine-tuning datasets containing customer data
- Audit trails exposing more than anyone realized
- Pipelines full of sensitive fields no one had time to clean
The tools built to address these weren’t designed for modern AI workflows. They were built for DBAs instead of developers and designed on the assumption that users already had multi-cloud infra teams. Such tools require multi-month deployments. And the pricing models expected you to be a unicorn, not an early-stage company.
One founder summed it up perfectly: “I need privacy controls this week, not this quarter. I need $250/month, not $50K. And I need 3 lines of code, not 3 months of engineering.”
Built for Developers, Not Committees
We designed Protecto SaaS with the goal of making privacy feel like adding an API, not deploying an enterprise platform. Here’s how we approached it:
- API-first: No infra to manage. No databases to replace. No multi-month onboarding.
Just an API you drop into your existing workflow. Works with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Claude, GPT-4, your own pipelines or whatever you already use.
- Context-aware masking: Traditional masking destroys meaning: “Patient John Smith has diabetes” → “[PII] [PII] has [PII]”
Our context aware masking preserves semantics: “Patient [PERSON] has diabetes”. This way, your LLM still understands the sentence while fully protecting data.
- High-recall, LLM-powered detection: Regex catches maybe 70–85% of PII. We wanted 99%+. So we layered LLM understanding with statistical validation and domain rules.
- Real-time + async: Real-time masking adds <50ms. Async for embeddings, fine-tuning, batch jobs. You get the flexibility to pick what works for your stack.
- Startup pricing: $250/month instead of $50K. No contracts allows you to cancel anytime. Free tier with 1,000 API calls or free for upto 14 days so you can test it risk-free.
Enterprise-grade, but priced for startups
- GDPR/HIPAA/CCPA-ready
- Data isolation
- Role-based access controls
- Detailed audit trails
- Optional SLAs
Pricing tiers
Fintech startup (Series A)
They needed to train financial models without exposing user data. Enterprise vendors quoted $50K/month and 3 months of integration.
They signed up for Protecto on Monday morning and had it running in production by Monday afternoon.
Outcome: shipped in 48 hours instead of stalling the roadmap for a quarter.
Healthcare startup
Their HIPAA compliance team was blocking their patient-note processing pipeline. The in-house masking solution kept breaking.
They replaced it with Protecto.
Outcome: HIPAA-ready in one day, compliance approved in 30 minutes.
Customer service AI tool
They were about to launch but realized their support tickets were full of sensitive data.
With Protecto SaaS, they launched in one week instead of three months.
The common thread? Teams moved from blocked to shipping in days, not months.
And they did it for 1/200th the cost of enterprise tooling.
Getting Started in Simple Steps
Step 1: Sign up
Takes one minute. No credit card. Free tier includes 1,000 API calls.
Step 2: Integrate
Choose your integration (LangChain, N8N, CrewAI, or any agent builder). Add a few lines of code. Test locally.
Step 3: Run your first masked query
Watch your PII get detected and masked instantly. See if your AI still behaves normally.
Step 4: Deploy when ready
Move to production. Scale as you grow. Zero friction. No sales call required.
If you’re building AI, you’ll hit this problem sooner than you expect. When you do, we hope Protecto makes your life a lot easier.
Try Protecto free. See if it works for you.
