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What the free tender portal shows, and what it does not

Every open US solicitation Offra tracks is browsable with no account and no card. What that covers, and the line where the paid product actually starts.

An Offra card reading "What the free tender portal shows, and what it does not"

The usual shape of procurement software is that the list of open tenders is the paywall. You pay for access to notices that were published by public bodies specifically so that anyone could read them.

We took the opposite position, and it is worth explaining rather than announcing. The open solicitations Offra tracks are at /tenders, browsable and searchable with no account and no card, because the list is not the product. Knowing what is open is table stakes. Knowing which of those you should spend three weeks on is the part worth paying for.

What is actually in there

Federal solicitations from SAM.gov, nationwide. State portals — TxDOT lettings in Texas, eVA in Virginia, WEBS in Washington, PASS in the District of Columbia. And a growing set of municipal and agency boards running on OpenGov: Seattle, Phoenix, Orlando, Norfolk, DC's Department of General Services, Nashville's WeGo, 1GPA.

That last group is the one worth calling out, because city and transit-authority work often never reaches a state portal at all. A contractor watching only the state feed for Washington or Arizona is not seeing a slice of the market that is genuinely open to them.

Everything is filterable by state, by classification, by set-aside and by deadline, and every notice has its own page you can link a colleague to.

The free account adds one thing, deliberately

There is a free tier, and it is not on the pricing page because it is not a plan so much as a standing subscription to a search.

You save a search and you get an email when something matching it opens. That is the whole of it — no tender analysis, no compliance checklist, no Opportunity Radar, no win intelligence. If you already know your market and simply do not want to check a portal every morning, that is a complete answer to the problem you have, and it costs nothing.

What the portal cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether to bid.

Nothing on the public side is scored, because scoring requires knowing your firm — what you have built, where you are licensed, what your bonding capacity is, which classifications you actually hold. A fit score is not a fact about the notice; it is a fact about the relationship between the notice and one specific company, and it only exists because we computed it for that company.

This is the honest line between free and paid, and it is a cleaner one than most: filtering the public catalogue by public facts is free forever; filtering it by your fit and win likelihood is the paid product, because that data did not exist until someone paid to have it produced.

One scope limit worth stating plainly

The matching side of the product — the Opportunity Radar that scores fresh notices against your firm — draws on open construction work. The portal itself carries what the sources publish, which for several feeds is every sector, but the firm-specific matching is construction today.

If you are a professional services or supply firm, the analysis, checklist and review work applies to any tender you upload, in any sector. The radar will be thin. We would rather say that here than have you find it out after a purchase.

What we deliberately do not publish

You will not find placing statistics anywhere on the site — no "the lowest bid wins X percent of the time," no win-rate benchmarks.

The reason is specific rather than coy. The only sources that publish losing bids alongside a winner are ones where the winner is defined as the lowest bidder, so any statistic drawn from them would restate the rule and dress it up as an insight. A number like that would be easy to generate and would look authoritative in a slide. We show nothing instead.

Texas is the one place where the loop genuinely closes: TxDOT publishes its own sealed engineer's estimate with the letting, and its bid tabulations later resolve the same project into the winner and every losing bidder's price and rank. Where that data exists, we use it. Where it does not, we say so rather than substituting something weaker.

Where the boundary sits

The portal answers "what is open." The product answers "which of these should we chase, what does this one oblige us to produce, and what is it likely to take to win it."

Those are different questions, and only the second one needs to know anything about you. Go and use the first one — it is right here, and it will still be free when you are done reading.

Related reading: why Offra shows you what it is unsure about.

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