Tender alerts for UK public sector contracts

UK central government, the NHS, local authorities, housing associations, police, fire and rescue services, universities, and devolved administrations award hundreds of billions of pounds of contracts every year. The headline figure is over £400 billion in public sector spend annually, and a large slice of it goes through formal tender notices published on dozens of different procurement portals.

Most existing tender-alert services charge £500 to £2,000 a year per user for what is essentially keyword matching against public data. We think that is the wrong model. The notices themselves are public, and the work to aggregate them is largely automatable. So browsing and searching every live tender is free on TenderSignal, for everyone, with no card, and your saved searches count the new matches for you each week at no cost. Pro (£39 a month + VAT) is for suppliers who want the finding done for them: every match every morning, an AI fit score, buyer contacts and portal links on hard-to-find tenders, and contracts in your sectors coming back out to tender. Free lets you browse and discover. Pro does it for you.

Set up your keywords once. On the free plan you can browse the full database, see who won previous awards and review live deadlines without paying, and a Tuesday morning email tells you how many new tenders each saved search found that week, so you know when a search is worth running. If a weekly count is not enough for how fast you need to move, Pro brings the matching tenders themselves to your inbox every morning, ranked by fit, with the reason each one matched and anything closing soon flagged.

After you register, you will be guided through a short onboarding to tell us about your business, sectors you work in, the regions you cover, and the keywords for the work you typically bid for. This builds your default profile, but the most important step is creating your saved search.

A saved search is a named bundle of keywords. For example, a facilities management contractor might create a saved search called "FM services" with keywords like "facilities management", "facility maintenance", "hard FM", "soft services", "TFM", "cleaning contract", "M&E maintenance". A signage fabricator might create one called "Signage" with "signage", "wayfinding", "external signs", "interior signs". CPV code categories can be layered on top to narrow further.

As new tenders arrive, they are checked against every saved search. On Pro, your matches arrive by email every morning, ranked by fit, with the reason each one matched, and you can create as many saved searches as you need. Your first saved search is set up from the keywords you give us at onboarding, and you can edit its keywords any time.

On the free plan, your saved searches keep counting. The Tuesday morning email tells you how many new tenders each one found that week, without listing the tenders, and you run the search yourself to find them. It is a simple way to know when a search is worth opening, at no cost.

From a Pro alert you click straight into the full tender detail: buyer information, contract value, deadline, evaluation criteria, buyer contacts and a link straight to the buyer's portal and documents, where you submit your bid. On the free plan every tender page is still open to you, with buyer contacts shown on tenders that are also on the national portals.

Free lets you browse and discover. Every live tender is open to you: search, filter and sort, open every tender page, check award history and buyer pages, and keep saved searches that count new matches. Every Tuesday morning you get an email telling you how many new tenders each saved search found that week. The email lists counts, not tenders, so you sign in and search for them yourself.

Pro does it for you. New matches for every saved search arrive every morning, ranked by fit, with the reason each one matched, plus buyer contacts, portal links on hard-to-find tenders, contracts coming back out to tender and tender tracking with reminders. If you leave Pro, the account moves to Free on its own and your saved searches stay and keep counting.

That is the honest shape of free tender alerts here: free search and a free weekly count of new matches, with no card and nothing to cancel, and the matches themselves every morning on Pro when a weekly count is not enough.

Many public-sector tenders publish with a submission window of around four weeks. That sounds generous, but it includes time for you to read the specification, decide whether to bid, ask clarification questions (often with a deadline 10 days before submission), draft your response, get internal approvals, and proof-read. In practice, suppliers who see a tender within days of publication have a meaningful advantage over those who find it with two weeks to go.

Email alerts close that gap. Instead of remembering to log into Find a Tender every few days, or paying a researcher to monitor feeds, your inbox brings you the opportunity the next morning on Pro, ranked by fit and ready to read. For high-volume suppliers (FM contractors, IT resellers, consultancies) that daily cadence often means seeing two to five matches a day; for niche specialists the free weekly count is often enough to know when to run a search, and that one match is still worth a serious bid effort.

The other reason early alerts matter is the pre-market engagement opportunity. Some notices are Prior Information Notices (PINs) or "Preliminary Market Engagement" notices, published months ahead of the formal tender to gauge supplier interest. Spotting these gives you a chance to influence the eventual specification, attend supplier days, and build relationships with the procurement team before competitors are even aware the opportunity exists.