RFP Harvest
Turning scattered government procurement data into actionable leads.
The Problem
Government agencies at the federal, state, and local level publish Requests for Proposals across hundreds of different portals, each with its own format and posting schedule. Contractors who want to bid on this work have two choices: hire someone to manually check dozens of websites every day, or miss opportunities.
Most small and mid-sized contractors don't have the staff for daily procurement research. They find out about RFPs through word of mouth, often too late to put together a competitive bid.
The Solution
We built an automated collection system that monitors government procurement portals, extracts RFP details, normalizes them into a consistent format, and makes them searchable in one place. Contractors can filter by category, agency, location, and deadline — and get alerts when new opportunities match their criteria.
The system runs daily, adding new RFPs and flagging deadlines automatically. No manual research. No missed bids because someone forgot to check a portal.
How We Thought About It
Government websites are notoriously inconsistent. Some publish structured data. Some post PDFs with no metadata. Some use legacy systems that break standard scraping approaches. The naive solution is to build one universal parser and hope it works. It doesn't.
We took the same adapter-based approach we use across all our data aggregation projects: each source gets its own extraction logic, tuned to that portal's specific format and quirks. When a government agency redesigns their procurement page (and they do, without warning), we fix one adapter instead of debugging an entire pipeline.
The real value isn't the scraping — it's the normalization. An RFP from one agency might list a deadline as "COB March 15" while another says "3/15/2026 5:00 PM EST." We parse all of it into structured, comparable data so contractors can actually make decisions.
The Result
- Automated monitoring across multiple government procurement portals
- Searchable, filterable database of active RFPs
- Alert system for new opportunities matching contractor criteria
- Hours of daily research eliminated for each user