Good engineers should not need a compliance department to bid.

Selling software or services to the Department of Defense takes more than being good at the work. Before a small company can bid, it has to price labor the way FAR Part 31 expects, build indirect rates an auditor will accept, answer every instruction in Section L and every criterion in Section M, and show how it protects controlled unclassified information under NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC.

Large contractors have whole departments for this. A one-person company has evenings. Plenty of capable engineers look at the pile, decide it is not worth it and take their skills somewhere else, and the government ends up with fewer bidders to choose from.

Almost all of that knowledge is public. It sits in regulations, standards and agency guides that anyone can read. What costs money is turning it into a worked answer for one company’s situation, and that step is mostly arithmetic, lookup tables and checklists. Software is good at those.

The work is done by builders, not corporate overhead. In defense contracting, corporations do not write code, configure shipboard networks, or secure enclaves—individual engineers, technicians, and craftsmen do. Yet in the traditional defense model, multi-layered prime contractors act as administrative tollbooths on cleared labor, capturing the vast majority of contract value simply by managing compliance paperwork. The worker who builds the system sees a fraction of their billing rate, while the taxpayer pays for sprawling corporate overhead.

ClearedStack turns that step into tools and gives the tools away. The aim is workplace autonomy and fair competition: the person doing the actual work should be able to bid, win, and own the value of their labor directly. By giving away the compliance, proposal, and pricing tools that previously required a corporate back-office, we level the playing field so solo builders, veteran founders, and independent engineering teams can compete on their own terms.

Each tool is a separate, MIT-licensed repository, so it can be read, forked and hosted on its own. This site is the index: the catalog lists every tool with the regulation it is built from, and the guides explain the same work in plain language.

Behind the catalog is a design for choosing and building tools in the open: a pipeline of ten small programs that finds ideas, screens and scores them, and builds each tool from the public rule. It is written down in full under Platform, with a label on each specification saying whether it describes a design, something built or something running.

Ideas come from tools that already exist for government-contracting paperwork, from requests, and from doing the work. An idea is screened against five knockout gates, scored on a 100-point rubric, and decided by a person. Only the job is taken from an existing tool. Its code, text and design are never copied, and where a product inspired the job it is credited.

Read How we decide what to build and Clean room and credit.

All work on ClearedStack is drafted at authoring time with AI assistance (Claude Code and Antigravity) under one human owner who sets direction, decides every outcome, reviews every change, merges, and is accountable.

Every regulatory statement and mathematical formula is checked by a person against the cited public source before it ships. AI output is never the source of a rule, and we never enter CUI, non-public material, real contract figures, or personal data into an AI tool.

Most importantly: no AI runs in any tool, and none is designed into the pipeline that builds them. A tool is ordinary code that gives the same answer for the same input every time.

Read the complete disclosure in How AI is used to build this project.

• No revenue.No ads, sponsorships, affiliate links, paid tiers or donations. The project costs its users nothing and earns nothing.
• No data collection.No analytics, cookies or accounts. This site makes no third-party requests, and its content security policy tells your browser to block any that slip in. As with any website, the company hosting it can see the IP address a page was requested from.
• Public sources only.Tools are built only from material the government has officially released to the public: regulations, standards and guidance. No classified, controlled or otherwise non-public information goes into them, and a leaked document does not count as public.
• Show the work.Each tool will cite the regulation or standard behind its results, so you can check the answer instead of trusting it.

ClearedStack is an independent personal project, built on personal time with personal equipment. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, any military service or any other government agency. The views expressed here are the maintainers’ own. They do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or its components, or an official position of the U.S. Government.

The name is only a name. ClearedStack does not grant, verify or imply a security clearance, a facility clearance, an authorization to operate, or a certification such as CMMC or FedRAMP.

The tools are aids for your own work. They are not legal, accounting, tax or compliance advice, and they can be wrong or out of date. Regulations change. Check results against the current text of the governing regulation, and talk to a qualified professional before you rely on a number in a bid or sign an attestation.

Keep classified information out. No tool listed here is approved for it.

The software is provided under the MIT License, without warranty of any kind.

Tool requests, corrections and contributions are welcome at [email protected] or on GitHub. If a tool gets a regulation wrong, that is the most useful thing you can report.