US Local Bid Portals Scraper — state, county, city and school-district solicitations

SAM.gov covers federal contracts. It does not cover the city that needs a paving contractor, the county buying security guard services, or the school district that has to replace its network before the funding year closes. Those live on a few hundred separate portals, most of which have no feed at all, and the handful that do publish machine-readable data are the ones this Actor reads.

Nine feeds. One row per open solicitation. Who is buying, what they want, when it closes, and the link to bid.

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What is actually covered — read this before you buy

This is the honest part, and it is short on purpose. Counts are the number of solicitations that were genuinely open on 20 September 2026, the day each feed was measured.

Feed	Level	State	Open that day
City of Los Angeles (RAMP)	City	CA	429
City of New York	City	NY	4
Baton Rouge / East Baton Rouge Parish	City-parish	LA	9
Montgomery County	County	MD	17
Washington DC — Office of Contracting and Procurement	District	DC	33
State of Delaware	State	DE	43
Illinois Capital Development Board	State	IL	47
State University Construction Fund	State authority	NY	3
US school districts, schools and libraries — FCC Form 470	School district	All 50	226

That last row is the one most people come for. Every US school district and library that wants E-Rate funding for internet, network hardware or telecom has to file an FCC Form 470 and then wait 28 days before it can sign with anyone. That waiting period is the competitive bidding window, and it is public. A form whose window is still open is a district actively taking bids. On the day this was measured there were 226 of them, from Rocklin Unified in California to Sampson County in North Carolina.

Now the gaps, stated plainly.

• Eight named jurisdictions is eight, not "US local government." Los Angeles, New York City, Baton Rouge, Montgomery County MD, Washington DC, Delaware, the Illinois Capital Development Board and the SUNY Construction Fund. If your target city is not on that list, it is not in here. The school-district feed is the only nationwide one.
• Most US local portals publish nothing a machine can read. They are login-gated vendor portals or HTML pages behind a session. Those were checked and left out rather than half-scraped.
• The school-district feed tells you a district is buying, not every detail of what. You get the requirement description the district wrote, the funding year, the entity number and a link to the certified Form 470 PDF. Where the district attached a separate RFP document, the form says so and the document lives on the district's own site.
• New York City's feed is thin. Four open RFPs the day it was measured, because the city only publishes a slice of its pipeline this way.
• Nothing here is EU, UK or US federal. If that is what you need, it is a different job and we have a separate Actor for it.

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What you get

One row per solicitation, the same shape from every feed:

{
  "source": "montgomery-county-md",
  "jurisdiction": "Montgomery County, MD",
  "jurisdictionLevel": "county",
  "state": "MD",
  "solicitationId": "1196087",
  "title": "County-Wide Contract Security Officer Services",
  "summary": null,
  "solicitationType": "RFP",
  "category": null,
  "status": "Active",
  "postedDate": "2026-08-10T00:00:00.000Z",
  "dueDate": "2026-10-28T00:00:00.000Z",
  "daysUntilDue": 38,
  "buyerDepartment": "Police",
  "estimatedValue": null,
  "url": null,
  "documentUrl": null,
  "portalUrl": "https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/PRO/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-20T09:58:12.104Z"
}

daysUntilDue is computed at run time, so you can sort by urgency without doing date arithmetic. Some fields are null on some feeds — a portal that does not publish an estimated value cannot have one invented for it, so the field stays empty rather than being guessed.

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No contact harvesting, and how that is enforced

These are public records, so they name people: the buyer who signed the notice, the procurement officer's direct line, the district technology co-ordinator's email. None of that is delivered.

Two separate steps, because one was not enough:

1. The contact columns are never requested. On the school-district feed that means four whole blocks of the source data — contact_*, technical_contact_*, authorized_person_* and the entity's own email and phone — plus its latitude and longitude, are left out of the query. They never cross the wire.
2. Email addresses and phone numbers are stripped out of the free-text description before the row is written. This matters more than it sounds: of 60 live school-district forms checked on 20 September, 15 had a named person's email typed into the requirement text. Those become [contact removed]. The requirement itself is untouched.

If you need the contact, it is on the notice, on the jurisdiction's own portal, where they published it. Every row carries that link.

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Input

Press Start with the form as it comes and you get open solicitations from all nine feeds.

Field	What it does
sources	Which feeds to read. All nine by default.
keywords	Words that must appear in the title, category or buying department. OR'd together, so ["paving","asphalt"] returns both. Each portal does this filtering itself, so a narrow keyword costs less than a broad one.
states	Two-letter codes. A feed belonging to a state you did not list is not queried at all, and the school-district feed is narrowed to the states you name.
onlyOpen	On by default. Off gives you the portal's whole list, closed ones included.
maxItems	Hard ceiling for the run, 5000 max. Shared across the feeds you picked, so one large city cannot use up the whole allowance.

{
  "sources": ["erate-f470", "montgomery-county-md", "dc-ocp"],
  "keywords": ["network", "fiber", "wireless"],
  "states": ["TX", "OK", "NM"],
  "onlyOpen": true,
  "maxItems": 300
}

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A portal that cannot answer says so

An HTTP 200 is not the same as an answer, and this is where bid feeds go wrong. A portal can hand back a perfectly valid response that is somebody else's data, or an unfiltered list when you asked for a filter, or a login page wearing a JSON content type.

So every page is checked before a single row is delivered:

• Is it the right dataset? The columns have to be the ones that feed is supposed to have. A portal that quietly changes shape is skipped, not parsed hopefully.
• Did it apply the filter? If you asked for open solicitations and rows come back already closed, or you asked for a keyword and the rows do not contain it, that feed is answering a different question. Its whole page is dropped.
• Is it JSON at all? An HTML body on a JSON endpoint is a refusal, however it is dressed.

When any of those fails you get an uncharged row naming the feed, the reason in plain English, and the portal's own URL so you can go and look. A dead feed is never a silent zero, and it never costs you anything.

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Pricing

$16.00 per 1,000 solicitations, plus a $0.0005 start fee per run. One charge per solicitation delivered, flat on every plan — no volume tiers, no minimum, no subscription.

A solicitation here is a live bid from a named public buyer, with its closing date and the link to the jurisdiction's own posting. The last full sweep returned 833 of them from 302 distinct buying entities, 189 of which were independent school districts across 35 states.

Free every time: the sample row an empty run returns, the notice when a feed is skipped, the "nothing matched" row, and any error row. You pay for solicitations, so a run that finds none costs you the $0.0005 and nothing else.

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What this does not do

• It does not cover every US city, county or state. Eight jurisdictions plus the nationwide school-district feed, listed above with counts.
• It does not log into vendor portals, create accounts, or accept your portal credentials.
• It does not download bid packets or attachments. It gives you the link the jurisdiction published.
• It does not score, rank or recommend anything. It returns the solicitations; the bid/no-bid call is yours.
• It does not return contact names, emails or phone numbers. See above for why and how.
• It does not cover EU, UK or US federal tenders.
• It does not promise a feed will still be there next month. Jurisdictions retire datasets without warning; when one does, the run tells you which and keeps going with the rest.

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FAQ

Is there an API key or a login? No. Every feed here is a public government endpoint that answers without credentials. Nothing is stored, nothing is signed in.

How fresh is the data? As fresh as the jurisdiction makes it. Los Angeles, Montgomery County and the school-district feed had all been updated the same day they were measured. Delaware and Illinois were within three days. The feed's own timestamps come through in postedDate.

Why is New York City only showing a handful? Because that is what the city publishes on this feed. Four open RFPs on 20 September. It is a real number, not a broken query.

What does dueDate mean on a school-district row? The close of the FCC's 28-day competitive bidding window — the first day the district is allowed to sign with a vendor. Up to that date it is still taking bids. Measured across the newest forms, the gap between certification and that date sits at a consistent 27 days.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes, and that is the sensible way to use it. Point it at your keywords and states, run it daily, and sort by daysUntilDue.

Can you add my city? Only if it publishes a machine-readable feed. Most do not. Send the portal and it can be checked.

Why does a row have empty fields? Because that jurisdiction does not publish that field. Nothing is filled in with a guess.