Why I built Clonio — and where we're headed Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I'm Rok, the creator of Clonio, and I want to share the story behind it. What inspired me to build this It started with a conversation I've had too many times: a developer asks for production data to reproduce a bug, and someone has to manually export a table, find-and-replace a bunch of email addresses, hope they didn't miss a column, and drop a CSV in Slack. That workflow is slow, error-prone, and terrifying from a GDPR perspective. A single forgotten column — one unmasked phone number landing in a test environment — can turn into a compliance incident. I kept seeing teams either avoid realistic data entirely (and miss bugs that only show up in production-like conditions) or use real data in ways that made their data protection officer uncomfortable. There had to be a better way. The problem Clonio solves Regulations like GDPR require that personal data is handled carefully and not used beyond its original purpose. Non-production environments typically have weaker security controls and wider access. That combination is a liability. Clonio automates the bridge: it reads your production database, applies the anonymization rules you configure (fake names, hashed emails, masked phone numbers, or null), and writes safe synthetic data to your staging or dev database. The schema follows automatically. Foreign key integrity is preserved. And every run generates a cryptographically signed audit report you can hand to a data protection auditor. How we've evolved while building toward launch We started with the core transfer engine and a simple UI. Over time, three things kept coming up in early feedback: "We need to prove to our DPO that this actually ran correctly." — That became the signed audit trail. Every run is documented with HMAC-SHA256 signing so the report can't be tampered with after the fact. "Can we trigger this from our deploy pipeline?" — That became the API trigger URLs and the ready-to-paste CI/CD snippets for GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, CircleCI, and more. "Our AI agent should be able to kick this off automatically." — That became the AI integration: all docs available as raw Markdown at a .md URL, and an intentionally simple trigger API that any LLM tool-caller can use without a custom integration. We're a small team and still early. We'd love to hear what you're working with — which databases, which pipelines, which compliance requirements. Every piece of feedback has directly shaped the product so far. Happy to answer anything in the comments. And if you self-host Clonio, let me know how the installation goes — we want that experience to be as smooth as possible. — Robert

Clonio

GDPR-safe database cloning for dev with a signed audit trail

GDPR-safe database cloning for dev with a signed audit trail