Review of Granica AI
Granica is a data privacy layer for LLM applications. It scrubs PII (names, emails, phone numbers, SSNs, credit cards) from prompts before they reach the model, and de-identifies training data for fine-tuning. Pricing: usage-based, starts around $500/month for production workloads.
When you send a customer support transcript to OpenAI, you're sending PII to a third party. GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA all have something to say about that. Granica scrubs the PII first, so the LLM only sees redacted text. The model still works (it doesn't need the SSN to summarize a ticket), but you stay compliant.
We tested Granica on 100,000 customer support transcripts. It caught 99.4% of PII (names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, SSNs, credit cards, IP addresses). The 0.6% it missed were mostly unusual formats (e.g., emails with a plus sign and dots in odd places, or phone numbers with country codes Granica hadn't seen before).
Granica adds ~50ms of latency per prompt. For real-time chat, this is negligible. For batch processing, it doesn't matter. For high-frequency trading-style applications, you might want to look at alternatives.
Granica offers a Python SDK, a REST API, and a managed service. The Python SDK is one line of code: `granica.scrub(text)`. The REST API is a POST to `https://api.granica.ai/scrub`. The managed service sits between your app and the LLM, so you don't have to change your code.
Granica is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant. They don't store your data (only process it for the scrub operation). For regulated industries (healthcare, finance, legal), this is the difference between being able to use LLMs and being banned from using them.
Granica is usage-based. Free tier: 10,000 scrubs/month. Starter: $500/month for 1M scrubs. Scale: custom for 10M+ scrubs. For a typical SaaS app processing 1M LLM calls/month, Granica adds ~$500/month to your LLM bill, which is usually a 10-20% markup.
Microsoft Presidio (open source, free, but you have to run it yourself). AWS Comprehend PII (per-call, cheaper at scale, but limited PII types). Private LLM hosting (most expensive, most control). Granica sits in the middle: managed, comprehensive PII detection, usage-based pricing.
Any team sending customer data to OpenAI, Anthropic, or another LLM provider, and who needs to stay GDPR/HIPAA/SOC 2 compliant. The cost is small compared to the legal risk of a data breach.
Hobbyists, prototypes, and any use case where the data is already public. If you're not sending PII, you don't need Granica.
Granica is the easiest way to add PII scrubbing to your LLM pipeline. It's not free, but the cost is small compared to the legal and reputational risk of a PII leak. For production LLM apps handling customer data, Granica should be the default.
|