144 builds security software for the people who do the work — practical tools at a price a small team can actually pay.
The Department of Defense buys from hundreds of thousands of private companies — and a great many of them are small: machine shops, parts suppliers, specialty manufacturers, and the IT firms that support them. After years of sensitive defense information being stolen from contractor networks, the DoD now requires every company that handles Controlled Unclassified Information to meet a fixed cybersecurity standard, NIST SP 800-171, enforced through CMMC. No certification, no contracts.
For a large defense prime with a security team, that's a project. For a 12-person machine shop, it's a wall. The owners aren't security professionals, the standard is dense, and the consultants who can guide them charge tens of thousands of dollars. The enterprise compliance platforms are built — and priced — for funded companies with IT staff. At the other end, free tools hand you a score and leave you to figure out the rest.
144 started as the missing middle for CMMC: guided, affordable software that does the practical work a consultant would, at a price a small shop can actually pay. It walks you through every control in plain language, scores you the way the DoD does, tells you what to fix first and what it will cost, and produces the documents an assessor expects. It turns a 110-item wall into a dated, budgeted project plan.
That approach — take something dense and expensive, make it clear and reachable — turned out to apply well beyond compliance. Today 144 is a small family of security tools built on the same principle.
144 CMMC — CMMC / NIST 800-171 readiness software for small defense contractors. Self-assessment, SPRS scoring, a prioritized roadmap, and the documents an assessor expects. Start free with the SPRS calculator.
SecNote — a security workspace for iPhone and iPad, now on the App Store. Encrypted notes, a live CVE watchlist from the NVD, a curated threat-intel news hub, voice notes, and habit tracking — one app instead of five, synced privately through your own iCloud with no account.
We sell software to security-conscious people, so our own posture matters. The rule is the same across everything we build: keep your most sensitive data where it belongs — in your hands. 144 CMMC records your security posture and pointers to where your evidence lives, but never your Controlled Unclassified Information itself. SecNote keeps your notes on your device and in your own iCloud, with no accounts and no analytics — we have no servers that can see them. Lean by design, private by default.
144 is a readiness tool. It prepares you so that when an accredited third-party assessor (a C3PAO) arrives, you pass. It is not the official certification, and it doesn't perform the technical fixes in your environment for you — it tells you precisely what they are and helps you track them done. We keep that line clear on purpose: it's honest, and it keeps the focus on getting you genuinely ready.
The name 144 comes from Psalm 144:1 — a personal verse: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.” The mission is the same shape as the verse: equip the small contractors who do the work of the country’s defense to be ready for the fight they’re being asked to step into. That’s what this software is for.
Start with the free SPRS calculator — it'll tell you how big the job really is.