Choosing a service
Free and paid tender alerts, honestly compared
Including the case for paying nothing at all, which is the right answer for more businesses than any vendor will tell you.
Prices checked 18 September 2026 on each provider's own pricing page, and BidStats on 19 September. Providers change them, and several do not publish them at all.
Start with the free option, properly
Every UK public sector notice above the publication thresholds is free to search, on official government portals, with free email alerts. No paid service has access to anything the portals do not publish, because there is no private feed to have access to.
- Contracts Finder, England and UK-wide central government, including below-threshold work from £12,000.
- Find a Tender, higher-value UK notices.
- Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales, for the devolved nations.
If you sell to two or three named buyers, or in one narrow category, saved searches on those portals will do the job. Set them up before you pay anyone anything.
When free stops working
About 117 contracts are awarded every working day across those portals, and notices are spread across four sites with different search behaviour and different classifications. Free alerts either send you everything, which nobody reads, or too little, which you never notice. That is the actual problem paid tools solve: not access, filtering.
What paid services actually sell
Almost all of them do some combination of four things. It is worth knowing which you are paying for, because the prices vary by more than an order of magnitude for overlapping capability.
| What you get | Why it costs money |
|---|---|
| Aggregation | One search across portals that classify things differently and spell buyer names inconsistently. |
| Filtering | Turning several hundred notices a week into the handful you could win. |
| Market intelligence | Award history, incumbents, contract end dates, competitor activity. |
| Bid support | Templates, response libraries, or people who write with you. |
Roughly what things cost
Only some providers publish prices. Those below are taken from public pricing pages on the date shown. Where a provider does not publish, it is listed as not published rather than guessed at.
| Service | Published price | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Official portals | Free | Notices and free alerts, no filtering or award intelligence |
| Supply2Gov | Free local tier; £25/mo or £270/yr single country; £80/mo or £499/yr UK; £95/mo or £899/yr UK and Ireland | Alerting by area and keyword |
Tender RadarStart free trial | £30/mo or £300/yr; agencies £1,200/yr for 5 client accounts, £2,000 for 10 | Scored daily digest, renewal dates, market intelligence, a team tracker with re-tender alerts, and a route into bid management. Agency plans add one combined morning email across every client account |
| BidStats | Free tier; Standard £35 per user a month or £350 a year; Pro £80 a month or £800 a year, three seats included; extra users £150 each plus VAT. Insights from £5,000 a year | Tender search with awarded contracts and an expiring-contract pipeline. History reaches back two years on Standard, five on Pro. Spend data, frameworks and decision-maker contacts are Insights only |
| Stotles | Free tier; Basic from £75/mo; Growth from £475/mo; Expert on application. Bid Studio priced separately, from £990/mo | Sales platform. Expiring-contract alerts start on the Basic tier |
| PSIP | Essential £199/mo (£169 billed annually); Growth £599/mo (£499); Professional £1,199/mo (£992); Bid Agency and Enterprise on application. All exclude VAT | Contract intelligence with council spend data and AI bid drafting. Expiry and competitor tracking start on Growth |
| Tussell | Not published on the website; listed on G-Cloud at enterprise rates | Market intelligence, aimed at large suppliers and analysts |
| Tenders Direct | Basic £1,359/yr; Core £2,044/yr; Premium £2,319/yr, with a 7-day free trial | Alerts with human-reviewed classification, expiry alerts up to 18 months ahead, and bid support |
| WinAContract | Not published: packages are quoted per application | Contract search and alerts, including Northern Ireland |
The spread is real. Tools aimed at enterprise sales teams cost multiples of tools aimed at a small firm that wants to know what to bid for on a Tuesday morning, and they are solving different problems.
What each one does
A tick means the provider publicly offers it. A dash means we could not find it in their public materials on the date at the top of this page, which is not the same as it being absent. If we have marked something wrongly, tell us and we will correct it.
| Service | Alerts | Below threshold | Award history | End dates | Value ceiling | AI scoring | Bid management |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official portals(free) | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials |
| Tender RadarStart free trial | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | Soon |
| Supply2Gov | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials |
| BidStats | ✓ yes | – not found in public materials | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials |
| Stotles | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | – not found in public materials | ✓ yes | ✓ yes |
| PSIP | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes |
| Tussell | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials |
| Tenders Direct | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | ✓ yes | – not found in public materials | – not found in public materials | ✓ yes |
Two things are worth reading off that table. Contract end dates used to be the rare column and are not any more: several services now sell them, mostly on a higher tier, so the question is what you pay to see them rather than who has them. What almost nobody offers is a maximum contract value, so a small firm keeps being shown frameworks it cannot bid for.
What Tender Radar now adds
Beyond the columns above, Tender Radar includes market intelligence on your buyers and competitors, a pipeline ordered by when you can act, a tracker your whole team shares with an alert when tracked work comes back out to tender, and short briefings on competitors and buyers with the facts printed beside them. All of it is in the same £30 plan. See how it works.
We have not added columns for these. Marking other providers against them would need the same check of their public materials as the rest of the table, and we would rather leave a column out than guess about a named company.
Where we fit, and where we do not
We would rather you bought the right thing than bought ours.
Tender Radar is a good fit if
- You have no bid team and no time to triage notices.
- You want the contracts you could realistically win, which usually means a value ceiling as well as a floor.
- You care about contract end dates, because getting in before the re-tender is the only way to beat an incumbent.
- You want finding the work and bidding for it to sit in one place, rather than exporting a list into a spreadsheet and starting again.
- You want to see your market, your competitors and your team's pipeline together, without an enterprise contract or a sales call.
Something else is a better fit if
- You need a full sales platform with CRM integration and pipeline reporting across a large sales team. Tender Radar's tracker is built for a bid team, not a sales operation, and that is what the enterprise tools are for.
- You want a full outsourced bid-writing service, where somebody else owns the response and delivers it for you.
- You only sell to two or three buyers you already know. Free portal alerts will cover you.
- You need deep coverage outside the UK. We include EU and US federal notices, but a specialist will do it better.
How to test any of them, including us
Do not buy on a coverage claim. Run a two-week trial against the free portals and count.
- Pick five contracts you would have wanted in the last year. Check the service would have shown you all five, early enough to bid.
- Count what arrives in a fortnight. How many were genuinely relevant? How many did you have to read to find them?
- Check the lead time. An alert three days before the deadline is not an alert.
- Test one buyer you know well. If the award history is wrong or missing for a buyer you can verify, treat every other figure with the same suspicion.
A claim worth checking on any provider, ours included
Be sceptical of “complete coverage”, “all opportunities” or percentages above one hundred. No service sees a notice a buyer never published, and none of them can promise a buyer classified a contract the way you would have. Ask what is missing, not what is included.
The honest summary
The free portals contain the same notices as every paid service. What you pay for is having them filtered, enriched with award history, and delivered in a form you will actually read. If that saves you an hour a week, most of these tools pay for themselves. If it does not, the portals are free and you should use them.
You can see the award history we hold on our buyer and supplier pages without paying us anything, which is the best test of whether the data underneath is any good.
Common questions
Do I have to pay for tender alerts?
No. Every UK public sector notice is published free on the government portals: Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales. All of them offer free saved searches with email alerts. A paid service sells filtering, award history and a digest you will actually read, not access to notices nobody else can see.
What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?
Find a Tender carries higher-value notices at or above the procurement thresholds, across the whole UK. Contracts Finder carries lower-value and below-threshold opportunities for England and UK-wide central government. Watching only Find a Tender hides most of the work a smaller supplier can realistically win.
How much do UK tender alert services cost?
Published prices run from about £30 a month at the lower end to several thousand pounds a year for market intelligence platforms. Most providers in this market do not publish a price at all and quote after a sales call, so a like-for-like comparison is only possible for the ones that do.
How do I judge whether a tender alert service is any good?
Give it a real profile rather than a generic one, then read a fortnight of digests and count how many opportunities you would genuinely have bid for. A service that sends fifty notices a day has not filtered anything, and one that sends nothing has filtered too hard. Ask to see the award history behind the alerts before paying.