Cybersecurity SaaS
NistCheck
NistCheck is a web application that helps organisations benchmark and improve cybersecurity maturity against NIST CSF v2.
Built for founders and CTOs who need strong technical execution with clear business impact.
"Crave Tech met our rigorous security standards while delivering a platform tailored to our use-case requirements. Their practical product and technical insights helped us shape an extensible, partner-ready platform that is engaging, user-friendly, and aligned with our vision."
Context
Teams needed a practical way to understand current cybersecurity posture, identify gaps, and prioritize improvement activities using a recognized framework.
Existing approaches were often spreadsheet-heavy, hard to maintain over time, and difficult to communicate clearly to leadership and stakeholders.
The product goal was to reduce dependency on expensive external consulting by giving internal teams a credible self-serve path to complete assessments and plan uplift work.
Challenge
The product had to balance usability and rigor, while supporting different user maturity levels and handling security-sensitive workflows.
A major technical constraint was dynamic report generation, including AI-assisted narrative content tailored to each assessment.
The reporting pipeline needed to produce consistent, readable output across varied assessment inputs while keeping generation times acceptable for an in-app workflow.
Security quality had to be demonstrably high for launch readiness, not just a best-effort implementation.
Solution
Designed and built a secure SaaS experience with guided assessments, evidence-backed scoring, maturity benchmarking, and team collaboration support.
Architected for free and paid plans so users could start quickly and upgrade when they needed deeper analysis and reporting.
Designed the tenancy model to support a partner ecosystem, allowing consultancies to operate their own NistCheck tenant and manage customer organisations within that environment.
Mobile was treated as a first-class experience from day one, with core assessment and reporting workflows designed to work reliably on phones and tablets as well as desktop.
The delivery emphasized clear user guidance at each step so teams could move from assessment to action without requiring deep framework expertise up front.
Core flows included creating new assessment revisions while preserving historical reports and trend data, inviting collaborators, and generating AI-assisted reports for stakeholder communication.
Delivery Approach
Delivered by a single engineer over approximately nine months, using product-led iteration and AI-assisted development workflows.
Started with deep problem framing to understand the business model and ensure architecture decisions supported extensibility, future growth, and multiple delivery use cases.
Embedded security, observability, and release discipline from the early stages to avoid rework later.
Working solo enabled rapid end-to-end decision making across product, architecture, and implementation while maintaining a coherent technical direction.
Technical Stack
Backend: C# .NET 8 API + background worker
Frontend: React, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui
AI reporting: Node.js PDF report generation service powered by the OpenAI API platform
Data: PostgreSQL
Cloud: Azure
Infrastructure: Terraform
Payments: Stripe for billing and customer management
What Shipped
- Guided NIST CSF v2 assessment workflows for structured, repeatable posture reviews.
- Evidence-backed scoring and maturity tracking to support credible internal reporting.
- AI-assisted dynamic report generation with exportable PDF outputs.
- Assessment revision workflow that keeps historical statistics and past reports intact for longitudinal tracking.
- Collaboration flow for inviting team members and coordinating contribution across assessments.
- Partner ecosystem tenancy support so consultancies can run NistCheck as a service with their own customer content boundaries.
- Role-aware account management with Stripe-backed subscription flows.
- Cloud-hosted production deployment on Azure with infrastructure managed in Terraform.
Outcomes
~9 months
Concept to production launch
1 engineer
End-to-end build and release delivery
Core feature shipped
AI-assisted dynamic report generation
Design-partner cohort
Early users validating workflow and report usefulness
Independent pentest completed
Received one of the cleanest reports the vendor had seen
This project is currently in early validation. Initial usage confirms demand and provides high-signal feedback for prioritizing roadmap improvements before broader marketing rollout.
Why It Matters
NistCheck demonstrates the ability to take a complex, compliance-adjacent problem from concept to production with strong engineering discipline, practical UX decisions, and AI used where it delivers clear user value.
For founders and CTOs, the key outcome is a technically credible product that helps enterprise teams identify actionable cybersecurity improvements while lowering assessment costs versus traditional consulting-heavy approaches.
It also establishes a platform model for partner-led growth, where consultancies can use NistCheck as a business service to deliver value and generate their own revenue streams.
It also shows how a focused delivery model can produce a robust SaaS foundation quickly, ready for growth, feature expansion, and go-to-market scaling.
Need This Level of Technical Delivery?
If you are a founder or CTO building an AI-enabled product and need end-to-end execution with strong engineering standards, let's talk.
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