Seamus White
I built BidSkim because public money should be winnable by the businesses that actually run this country, not just the ones that can afford a bid division.
Why I built this
The UK public sector spends about £250bn a year through procurement. A striking share of it flows to the same giant suppliers, and not because they do the work better. They win because they run capture teams that start a year before a tender exists: tracking contract expiries, meeting buyers, shaping requirements while the terms are still soft. The Palantirs and Capitas of the world have entire departments for this.
The cleaning firm in Bolton, the electrical contractor in Cardiff, the care provider in Fife does not. They have a founder reading tender portals at ten at night, deciding whether to sacrifice a weekend to a bid they cannot price the odds on. Those are the businesses that keep schools clean, roads lit and people cared for, and the system quietly prices them out with process rather than merit.
BidSkim is my answer to that. The system reads every public procurement notice published in Britain each morning, across Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales, collapses the duplicates, works out when existing contracts come back to market, and scores everything against what a supplier actually sells. The big firms buy that capability with headcount. I wanted it to cost less than a tank of diesel.
The standard for the data
The internet is filling with generated filler. This site is built to be the opposite of that.
Every number on these pages is counted out of the corpus BidSkim reads each morning, more than 800,000 notices, and each page states which notices were counted and on what date so you can argue with it. Where the published record is incomplete, the page says so and calls the figure a floor rather than inventing a total. When a buyer does not publish an end date, we flag the gap instead of guessing.
The work behind that is mostly unglamorous: reading tender packs nobody reads, diffing the official documents against the notices that summarise them, and rereading award notices to check a contract is the kind of work that genuinely returns to market. The disagreements between documents are usually where the useful truth lives, and no shortcut finds them.
Who it is for
Teams without a bid division. Which is most teams.
If your company has a capture team, you do not need me. BidSkim is for the firms where bidding costs the owner evenings and weekends: the ones who find the right tender too late, or never hear about the contract that fitted them perfectly because it renewed quietly with the incumbent. The product exists to hand that time back, and to put the same early-warning machinery the giants run into the hands of the businesses that make this country run.
How to correct me
If a number on this site is wrong, I would rather know. Every data page publishes its method and its limits, which makes it possible to check. Email [email protected] with the page and the figure and I will either fix it or explain where it came from.
See what BidSkim finds for your business.
Answer a few questions about what you do. Get a scored match report in minutes.