EU/UK Procurement Buyer & Award Signals

Turn recent public procurement notices into a normalized stream of buyer demand and verified award signals. The Actor queries the official TED, Find a Tender, and Contracts Finder APIs, applies the same local filters across sources, deduplicates overlapping records, explains its ranking, and exports attribution with every row.

Why use this Actor?

• Monitor opportunities and awards across one EU source and two UK sources in one schema.
• Find demand by keyword, buyer country, CPV prefix, date window, and published value.
• Rank by best fit, newest publication, nearest opportunity deadline, or highest value.
• Merge semantically equivalent notices while preserving every official source reference.
• Continue when one source fails and disclose the failure in the run OUTPUT record.
• Use public APIs only: no credentials, browser, or proxy required.

Quick start

{
  "sources": ["ted", "find_tender", "contracts_finder"],
  "signalTypes": ["opportunity", "award"],
  "keywords": ["cyber security", "software"],
  "buyerCountries": ["GB", "DEU"],
  "cpvCodes": ["72"],
  "publishedAfter": "2026-07-01",
  "minValue": 100000,
  "rankingMode": "bestFit",
  "maxResults": 100
}

If publishedAfter is omitted, the Actor uses the UTC date two calendar days before the run starts. Date windows are inclusive. Deadline filters apply only to opportunities; award rows are not discarded because they have no tender deadline.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Meaning
sources	string[]	all three	Any of ted, find_tender, contracts_finder.
signalTypes	string[]	both	opportunity, award, or both.
keywords	string[]	[]	Up to 10 normalized terms matched against title and organization names.
buyerCountries	string[]	[]	Up to 30 ISO alpha-2 or alpha-3 codes. GBR is normalized to GB.
cpvCodes	string[]	[]	Up to 20 CPV codes or prefixes, 2–8 digits each.
publishedAfter	YYYY-MM-DD	run date minus 2 days	Earliest publication date.
publishedBefore	YYYY-MM-DD	not set	Latest publication date.
deadlineAfter	YYYY-MM-DD	not set	Earliest opportunity deadline.
deadlineBefore	YYYY-MM-DD	not set	Latest opportunity deadline.
minValue	nonnegative number	not set	Minimum published value in the record's native currency. Missing values are excluded.
maxResults	integer	100	Maximum eligible rows, from 1 to 1,000, before a spending limit is applied.
rankingMode	string	bestFit	bestFit, newest, deadlineSoonest, or highestValue.

Currency values are not converted. Comparing or filtering values from different currencies is therefore not economically normalized.

Output

Each Dataset row contains:

• a deterministic signalId and signalType;
• title, buyer organization reference, and machine-identified awardees when safely available;
• country, CPV, published value and currency, publication/deadline/award/contract dates;
• deterministic fitScore and fitReasons;
• one or more sourceReferences with official notice ID, public URL, license, and retrieval time.

The key-value store OUTPUT record summarizes selected/successful/failed sources, scanned and normalized counts, filtering and deduplication counts, free and charged rows, and whether the charge limit stopped delivery.

Privacy boundary

This is an organization-level market signal, not a contact database. Source payloads can contain personal or direct-contact data such as contactPoint, postal details, email, or telephone values. The Actor uses those fields neither for output nor ranking, never stores the raw upstream payload, and exposes only the explicit Dataset schema. Awardees are emitted only when the source provides both a name and a machine identifier; otherwise the incomplete award signal is dropped.

Pricing

The published Actor uses Apify pay per event:

• Actor start event apify-actor-start: $0.00005.
• Dataset event procurement-signal: $0.002 per accepted paid signal.
• The first 10 free sample rows are written without a paid event.
• After the sample, the Actor checks the run event limit before every row and stops cleanly when the limit is reached.
• The implicit default Dataset-item event must remain disabled to prevent double charging.

These event names and exact prices are validated at runtime. The active Store configuration contains no priced apify-default-dataset-item event, preventing a second charge for the same Dataset row. Use maxTotalChargeUsd when starting a run to set a hard event-charge ceiling; the Actor preserves rows already delivered and reports when the limit stops additional paid signals.

Data licenses and attribution

• TED material is linked and attributed under the applicable EU reuse policy. Consult the official TED legal notice and the source notice for the current terms.
• Find a Tender and Contracts Finder OCDS data are used under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL-3.0).

Every row retains its official source URL, notice ID, license label, and retrievedAt timestamp. Do not remove attribution when redistributing the output.

Limitations

Upstream public APIs differ in coverage, update timing, classification detail, and organization identifiers. Cross-source deduplication is deliberately conservative and may retain near-duplicates rather than incorrectly merge separate procedures. A best-fit score is a prioritization aid, not a legal, eligibility, sanctions, or supplier due-diligence decision. Always verify the linked official record before acting.

Local development

npm ci
npm run check
npm run smoke:live
docker build -t eu-uk-procurement-buyer-award-signals .

npm run smoke:live is a bounded read-only check against the public source APIs. It writes no Apify Dataset rows and performs no publication.