UK Tenders Monitor — Contracts Finder & Find a Tender Alerts

Never miss a UK public sector opportunity again. This monitor watches both official UK procurement portals — Contracts Finder (below-threshold and wider public sector) and Find a Tender (high-value notices under the Procurement Act) — through their official OCDS APIs, and emits only the notices that are new since your last run, filtered to exactly what your bid team cares about: your keywords, your CPV codes, your buyers, your deal size.

Schedule it hourly or daily and pipe the dataset into Slack, email, Google Sheets or your CRM with any Apify integration. First run backfills the last 14 days (configurable); every run after that is a clean delta — no duplicates, deduplicated by OCID across both portals.

Example output record

{
  "ocid": "ocds-h6vhtk-06ef08",
  "source": "find-a-tender",
  "title": "Contract for the Purchase of up to 10 x Highways Chassis Cab Vehicles",
  "buyer": "City & County of Swansea",
  "valueGBP": 500000.0,
  "cpvCodes": ["34000000"],
  "publishedDate": "2026-08-30T16:25:00+01:00",
  "deadlineDate": "2026-09-30T12:00:00+01:00",
  "stage": "tender",
  "region": "UKL18",
  "url": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/082396-2026",
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-31T01:02:55Z"
}

stage is tender (open opportunity) or award (contract awarded — who won, for how much). region is the delivery region as published: a name on Contracts Finder (e.g. "London"), a NUTS/ITL code on Find a Tender (e.g. "UKL18"). valueGBP is the net stated value when the buyer publishes one.

Input options

Field	Type	Default	What it does
keywords	array	[] (all)	Case-insensitive match against title AND description, e.g. ["software development", "penetration testing"]
cpvCodes	array	[] (all)	CPV prefixes — "72" catches every IT services code
buyerNameContains	string	—	e.g. "NHS", "Council", "Ministry of Defence"
minValueGBP / maxValueGBP	integer	—	Value band. Notices without a published value are excluded when a bound is set
stages	array	["tender","award"]	tender = open opportunities, award = contract awards
sinceDays	integer	14	Backfill window on the first run; scan window on every run
maxItems	integer	200	Cap on new notices per run (cost control) — the rest emit next run
stateStoreName	string	uk-tenders-monitor-state	Change it to reset the monitor and re-run the backfill

Use cases

1. Bid team pipeline feed — "software development" + minValueGBP: 100000, scheduled every morning, straight into the pipeline spreadsheet. You see every relevant tender the day it goes live, with the submission deadline attached.
2. Incumbent and competitor intelligence — stages: ["award"] + buyerNameContains: "NHS" tells you who just won what, and for how much, across every NHS buyer — the groundwork for re-compete targeting.
3. Agency new-business radar — CPV prefix "79" (business services) or "7934" (advertising/marketing) + your region's councils via buyerNameContains, so account teams get a warm brief before the deadline pressure starts.

Pricing events

Event	Price	When
actor-start	$0.005	Once per run
tender-detected	$0.015	Per NEW notice emitted

A daily schedule with tight filters typically emits 0–10 notices per run — you pay for signal, not for polling.

Data sources & freshness

Official Cabinet Office OCDS APIs only — no scraping, no auth, Open Government Licence data:

• Contracts Finder: contractsfinder.service.gov.uk OCDS Search API
• Find a Tender: find-tender.service.gov.uk OCDS release packages API

Notices appear here within minutes of publication on the portals. If one portal has an outage, the run degrades gracefully and still delivers the other source (a warning is logged).

Maintenance promise: source schemas are monitored on every run (drift is logged, never crashes) and re-verified with each release.

Changelog

• 0.1 (2026-08-31) — Initial release. Both sources, keyword/CPV/buyer/ value/stage filters, OCID-deduplicated new-notice detection, 14-day backfill.