Where the data comes from
Every listing starts as a real posting on SAM.gov, the U.S. government's official contract opportunities system. We pull the daily bulk data feed SAM.gov publishes for public use — the same official data anyone can download themselves. We do not scrape web pages and we do not use any unofficial or third-party source. If a field isn't in the government's own data, we say so honestly instead of guessing.
What "open" means
A contract counts as open on this site only if all of the following are true: it's a real solicitation (not an award notice or a past record), it's still marked active by the contracting office, its response deadline hasn't passed, and it isn't a sole-source award already committed to one company before bidding could happen. This is the one definition we use everywhere — the same "open" count on the homepage, a storefront, a state page, and the explorer. We never loosen or tighten it page-by-page to make a number look better.
Location confidence: Confirmed, Verify, Estimated
The government's own data doesn't always say cleanly which state the actual work happens in. Rather than guess silently, every listing carries one of three honest labels:
- ✓ Confirmed
- The government's own record names this state directly. Highest confidence.
- ! Verify
- The government's location field was incomplete, so we extracted the state from the notice's own text. Usually right — always worth a quick check on the official notice before you plan around it.
- ~ Estimated
- No location was findable in the notice itself, so we show the state of the contracting office instead — the actual job site may be somewhere else.
We never show a location with no label. A card that can't clear at least the "estimated" bar honestly shows as location-unknown rather than a confident-looking guess.
The Fit score
Strong-Fit showcase cards carry a 0-100 Fit score and a short summary. Both come from a language model reading the notice's own text — run on our own hardware, never sent to a third-party AI cloud. The model never sees or uses anything except the notice's public text; it doesn't know who's bidding, doesn't guess win probability, and doesn't touch award or pricing history. "Strong" means the scope described genuinely matches the trade; "Possible" and "Poor" mean it's a partial or weak match worth a second look before you commit time to it.
Small-business set-asides
Where a contract is reserved for a certified small-business category — Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned, 8(a), Woman-Owned, HUBZone, or the general Total Small Business floor — we show it exactly as the government's own record lists it. We don't infer or predict eligibility; see the glossary for what each certification means.
How fresh is this
The site rebuilds from a fresh SAM.gov pull on a regular cadence, and every page's footer shows the exact date the data was pulled — "Data as of {date}" — never a vague "recently updated." If a page doesn't show a fresh stamp, treat the numbers as of that stamped date, not today.
What we don't do
- We don't scrape unofficial sources — only SAM.gov's own published data.
- We don't show a location without one of the three honest confidence labels above.
- We don't invent urgency — a listing with no deadline is never shown as time-pressured.
- We don't correct or silently rewrite the government's raw data (typos and all) — we only control how it's displayed, never what's stored.
- We don't put AI-generated scores or summaries anywhere except the labeled showcase.
Terms explained in one line each: see the glossary →