Most security budgets start as a spreadsheet somebody built in a weekend: a column of vendors a peer recommended, a column of guessed prices, and a total that nobody can defend when the CFO asks why. We built the recommendation engine to replace that spreadsheet, and until today you had to sign up to watch it work.
Now you can watch it on a company like yours. The Stack Builder runs the engine's Design mode on twenty sample profiles — five industries by four headcount bands — and shows the whole answer: three priced stacks, the architecture they form, and the deployment order with the playbooks we have written for each step.
What "three priced stacks" actually means
The engine does not start from products. It starts from capabilities: what a company of this shape, reporting against these frameworks, needs to be able to do. Multi-factor authentication on every admin account. Managed detection. Immutable backups. Each capability is tagged must-have, should-have or nice-to-have, and the three tiers are three depths of the same list — Lean covers the must-haves, Balanced adds the should-haves that fit the budget, Advanced goes further. The tier is the depth you buy, not a different opinion.
Only then does it pick products, from a catalog where every entry carries a public list price and the date we last verified it. That date is printed next to every total on the page, because a price nobody has checked in months is a guess wearing a number.
What it leaves open is printed too
A fintech profile shows something a brochure would hide: four PCI capabilities — cardholder-data segmentation, file-integrity monitoring on the cardholder environment, key management, tokenization — sit in the "left open" list of every tier, because no product in the catalog satisfies them on its own. They are architecture and process work. The engine says so instead of pretending a SKU covers it.
What it is not
It is not your answer. The sample profiles are fixtures; the dollars are modeled from headcount and list prices; nothing on the page scanned anything. Your own run starts from your intake and reads the configuration exports you upload — and that run is what the app grades, re-runs and turns into the report, the deployment plan and the board pack. The builder shows you the shape of the answer so you know what you are buying before you buy it.