The questions, before the pitch.
Everything below is about UK public procurement rather than about this product, up to the point where the two are the same question. Where an answer quotes a figure, that figure comes from the code that charges it.
Asked before signing up
Answers, with the caveats left in.
A few of these have an inconvenient half, and it is written down rather than left to be discovered on the first run.
- Is Find a Tender free to search?
- Yes. Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are published by the Cabinet Office and are free for anyone to search, and the notices themselves are public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. What the bureau charges for is reading every notice against your own company and scoring it — never for reaching the notices, which you could reach yourself.
- What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?
- Find a Tender is the central platform for procurements started under the Procurement Act 2023, which took effect on 24 February 2025. Contracts Finder is the older record, holding notices published under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. They are two registers rather than two views of one, so a run drives one portal at a time and which you pick depends on whether you are looking at current opportunities or at what a buyer has awarded before.
- Do I need to know my CPV code?
- No. The industry code is one of the 9 filters and it can be left at "any industry" — the 45 CPV divisions are there to narrow a search, not to gate it. If you would rather set one, the sector pages name the single division to use for each of the 112 trades listed across 12 sectors, because a search sets exactly one division and picking the wrong one is how a supplier concludes there is no work in their trade.
- How quickly is a new notice picked up?
- Immediately, because nothing is cached. A run drives the portal's own search at the moment you press the button, so anything published by then is in scope — there is no index of ours sitting between you and the register, and therefore no lag to quote. A run you have scheduled looks back over a window you set, 14 days by default and up to 90, so nothing published between two runs is missed.
- What does a search cost?
- A search you run yourself is 5 tokens, and a token is £1 at list — £5 a run, whether it assesses three notices or forty. One that fires on a schedule with no tab open is 7. Driving the portals, building your corpus, searching it and rendering the report are not charged for at all, and a run that assesses nothing is refunded automatically. Opening an account grants 5 tokens, which is one search, free.
- Does it cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
- Yes — 17 regions are filterable, covering all four nations and the Crown Dependencies. One caveat worth knowing before you draw a conclusion from a quiet result: Scotland publishes below-threshold work on Public Contracts Scotland rather than on Find a Tender, so a Scottish search on Find a Tender shows the larger contracts only.
- Is an assessment procurement advice?
- No, and the terms say so. An assessment is a language model reading published notice text against a profile you wrote, and it is advisory. It is a way of getting through forty notices in the time it takes to read three — it is not a substitute for reading the tender documents, and the decision to bid stays yours.
- Is my company profile used to train an AI model?
- No. Your profile and the notice text are sent to Anthropic's API when you start a run, which is the one outbound transfer of your content and the thing you are charged for. Your corpus of scraped notices is held against your account and nobody else's, and the voice guide's sessions are opted out of the transcription provider's model-improvement programme.