Guide
How to find RFPs worth responding to
Finding requests for proposal is not the hard part — there are more published every day than any team can read. The hard part is filtering thousands of notices down to the handful you can realistically win, before the deadline is a week away. Here is where they live and how to work through them.
The official sources
SAM.gov — US federal contract opportunities, including RFPs, RFQs, sources-sought notices and pre-solicitations.
Grants.gov — every US federal grant funding opportunity, across all grant-making agencies.
TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) — the EU's official journal of public procurement, carrying above-threshold tenders from all member states.
Below these sit state, county and municipal portals, university procurement pages, and the supplier portals of large public bodies. They are fragmented by design; there is no single national feed for sub-federal work in most countries.
Search by code, not by adjective
Free-text searching buries you. Use the classification codes: NAICS and PSC in the US, CPV codes in the EU. Codes are how buyers classify a notice, so code-based filters catch notices whose titles you would never have guessed. Add a value range and a geography filter and the daily volume becomes readable.
Triage in three questions
For every surviving notice ask: is it in our market, is it the right size for our delivery capacity, and is there enough time left to respond well? Anything that fails one of the three is a no — recording why builds a picture over time of where you actually win.
Watch sources-sought and pre-solicitation notices
The best time to see an opportunity is before the RFP exists. Sources-sought and market research notices let you introduce your capability while requirements are still being shaped. Responding to them is cheap and it puts you on the buyer's radar early.
Set up alerts, then reduce the noise
Portal email alerts work, but they are keyword-literal and generate a lot of noise. The practical setup is narrow saved searches per code plus a weekly manual sweep of your top two or three buyers' own portals.
Automating discovery and triage
This is the workflow Bidly runs for you: daily scans of official sources, filtering against your keywords, countries and value range, an explainable 0–100 fit score per notice, an expected value that already subtracts your bid cost, and an AI bid brief with strengths, risks and required documents.
Always verify deadlines, eligibility and submission instructions on the original notice at SAM.gov, Grants.gov or TED before responding.