German Funding Monitor

Monitor new public German funding programmes from an official public feed and export clean rows for research, advisory, sales, API, CSV, and alert workflows.

This Actor is for people who need a fast early signal when a new grant, subsidy, loan, or public funding programme appears in Germany. It is useful for agencies, consultants, founders, grant scouts, economic development teams, and operators who do not want to manually check funding pages every day.

What it does

• Reads the official Foerderdatenbank funding-programme RSS feed.
• Normalizes each programme into a clean dataset row.
• Enriches rows from the public detail page where available.
• Supports keyword, region, eligible-recipient, and funding-type filters.
• Supports newOnly mode for scheduled monitoring.
• Returns source-health and state information in the SUMMARY key.

Good first runs

Start with a small search so you can inspect the rows before scheduling anything.

AI / KI funding in Germany

{
  "keyword": "KI",
  "region": "bundesweit",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Grants for companies

{
  "eligibleFor": "Unternehmen",
  "fundingType": "Zuschuss",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Daily monitoring

The first run creates the baseline. Later runs with the same stateKey return only programmes that were not seen before.

{
  "newOnly": true,
  "stateKey": "digital-funding-daily",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "keyword": "Digitalisierung"
}

Who this is for

User	Useful when you need
Agencies and consultants	New funding topics for client advisory, newsletters, or market scans
Founders and SMEs	A lightweight alert when a relevant public programme appears
Grant scouts	Normalized rows that can be exported to CSV, Sheets, Airtable, or a CRM
Economic development teams	A simple feed of current programme signals without manual checking

Output fields

Each row contains:

• title
• summary
• funder
• fundingType
• fundingArea
• fundingRegion
• eligibleEntities
• publishedAt
• sourceFreshness
• leadReason
• detailUrl
• rankScore

Example row shape:

{
  "title": "KMU-innovativ: Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien",
  "funder": "Bundesministerium fuer Bildung und Forschung",
  "fundingType": "Zuschuss",
  "fundingArea": "Digitalisierung; Forschung und Innovation",
  "fundingRegion": "bundesweit",
  "eligibleEntities": ["Unternehmen", "Forschungseinrichtung"],
  "sourceFreshness": "current",
  "leadReason": "Matched keyword KI; matched region bundesweit",
  "detailUrl": "https://www.foerderdatenbank.de/..."
}

Fields vary because public funding pages vary. The row always keeps the official detailUrl so the source can be checked before anyone acts on it.

SUMMARY and source health

Each run writes a SUMMARY record to the key-value store. Check it when a run is empty or lower than expected.

The summary includes:

• normalized input
• source URL
• raw RSS item count
• parsed item count
• emitted item count
• filter counts
• source health
• newOnly state when monitoring mode is used

How it compares with manual search

Manual funding search is fine for one-off research. This Actor is better when you want the same check to run repeatedly and return data in a predictable format.

It gives you:

• official-source rows instead of scraped search snippets
• stable JSON/CSV output
• cheap small runs
• a newOnly mode for scheduled alerts
• a SUMMARY object that makes empty runs explainable

Source and limits

This version uses the official Foerderdatenbank RSS feed for current funding programmes. The broader website search is not used in this release because direct non-browser requests currently hit a Radware loader. That is intentional: this Actor favors stable, public, low-friction data over fragile browser automation.

Important limits:

• It is not a full historical funding database.
• It does not guarantee that every German funding programme is present.
• Detail-page enrichment is used only where the public detail page is reachable.
• Always check the official detail page before applying.
• The Actor does not provide legal, tax, or funding advice.

Pricing

This Actor charges per emitted dataset row:

• $0.0015 per funding programme row
• 10 emitted rows cost about $0.015
• 100 emitted rows cost about $0.15

There is no Actor-start fee at launch. If a run returns zero rows, there are no dataset rows to charge for.

Related German opportunity Actors

• German Tender Monitor for public procurement tenders.
• German Trade Fair Exhibitor Monitor for public exhibitor directory rows.

Changelog

0.1.0

• Initial funding-programme monitor.
• Official RSS source.
• Detail-page enrichment where available.
• Keyword, region, eligible-recipient, and funding-type filters.
• newOnly monitoring state.
• Source-health summary.