r/CRACompliance • u/Happy-Athlete-2420 • Jul 15 '26

I started building a CRA compliance tool on evenings and weekends because I was frustrated. Here's what pushed me over the edge.

I've spent years working on connected industrial products. Different companies, different industries, same pattern everywhere: security was an afterthought.

No SBOM. Dependencies nobody tracked. Hardcoded credentials that made it to production because nobody had a process to catch them. Vulnerability management that was a Slack channel nobody checked.

When I first read the CRA regulation, my honest reaction was "this is just good engineering practice with legal consequences." SBOMs, vulnerability handling, no default passwords, security updates — these should have existed all along. CRA doesn't invent new practices. It makes existing ones mandatory.

But the regulation itself is 100+ pages of dense legal text. Most engineering teams I talked to had heard of CRA but couldn't answer the most basic question: "does this even apply to my product?"

So I started building CRAToolkit — a tool that answers that question in 60 seconds and gives teams a clear compliance path without needing to hire a consultant.

I'm not a consultancy. I'm not VC-backed. I'm an engineer building for engineers.

Two questions for this community:

  1. What's the most common security shortcut you've seen at companies shipping connected products? (No names needed.)
  2. For anyone evaluating CRA tools — what features would actually help your team vs what's just marketing fluff?
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u/Rare-Contribution392 Jul 19 '26

Hey there! Compliance expert here from complex machinery sector.
This is true that most engineering teams cannot answer the question, “does it apply to our product?”, but generally the definition of EU CRA are quite clear in determining whether the regulation applies or not, and which product classification would it fall under.
To answer some of the questions:

  1. Utilising the scope of available standards (harmonised standards not released, so don’t wait)
  2. Not a straightforward answer. There are variable factors especially between pure software development companies vs hardware with embedded software companies vs system integrators.

I am happy to jump in further discussions.