How it works
We read it so you do not have to.
The federal government posts between 1,300 and 1,900 new contract opportunities on a weekday, written in language that takes years of practice to skim. Bidcolumn does the reading for you. Here is the whole process, start to finish.
Real postings, exactly as the government titles them
01
You describe your business once
Signing up asks one real question: describe your business like you would tell a neighbor. "We are a family cleaning company in Albany, about 14 people, offices and medical buildings mostly." That is the level.
Our system reads your description and plays it back in plain words: the kinds of work we will watch for, the states you serve, words to always include or never show you. You confirm or correct it before anything starts. You can edit all of it, anytime, from your account page.
02
We read everything, every night
Overnight, we pull every active posting from SAM.gov, the federal government's official public source for contract opportunities. That is roughly 15,000 open postings at any moment, with 1,300 to 1,900 new ones arriving on a weekday.
Each new posting gets read and scored against your business. Wrong line of work, wrong part of the country, work too big for a small company to realistically win: filtered out. About six in every ten postings are parts and supply purchases rather than work a service business could do, and you often cannot tell from the title. Every posting that survives comes with a one-sentence reason it matched you, written in plain English, referencing something specific in the posting.
We built the scoring to be picky on purpose. A junk match wastes your morning and teaches you to ignore the email. Missing a marginal maybe costs almost nothing. When in doubt, we leave it out.
03
Your digest arrives weekday mornings
Every weekday at 7 AM Eastern, if anything cleared the bar, you get one email. Each item includes:
- The opportunity, retitled in plain English
- One sentence on why it matched your business
- The agency, the deadline with days remaining, and the dollar value when the government published one. When they did not, we say so plainly instead of guessing.
- Set-aside status in normal words, like "set aside for small businesses"
- A direct link to the official posting on SAM.gov, where you would actually respond
- On days when nothing fits, no email. We will never pad a digest to look busy.
04
It gets sharper as you use it
Every item has two buttons: "Good match" and "Not for us." One click each. Those clicks tune your future digests, and you can always adjust your profile directly if your business changes.
No small print
The honest fine print, in the same size as everything else.
- We read public postings from official government sources. We have no inside access and no special relationships, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.
- We summarize postings to save you time. Before you bid on anything, read the full official posting. It is always one click away.
- Coverage is federal opportunities, nationwide, filtered to the states you serve. Federal is the whole claim. We do not cover state, county or city contracts, and we will not say we do before we can.
Start reading the short list instead.
Fourteen days free, then $49 a month. The price you sign up at stays your price.