If you have never used a tender alert service, start with TenderHawk's free tier. BidSkim earns its price on scoring quality, duplicate collapsing, renewal timing and the buyer and award intelligence behind each match.
A free and low cost UK alert service for small businesses, with plain English summaries of matched notices.
Price
£79 a month against £19 and £49
Both are free to start with no card. TenderHawk's paid tiers are £19 and £49 a month, well below BidSkim. BidSkim reads five official sources against their four, and adds comparable award benchmarks that TenderHawk does not document at any tier.
BidSkim is £79 a month, or £780 a year which works out at £65 a month. The intelligence plan is £189 a month, or £1,860 a year which works out at £155 a month.
TenderHawk. Free Scout at £0 with no card, Standard at £19 a month, Pro at £49 a month. Covers four official sources.
| Capability | TenderHawk | BidSkim |
|---|---|---|
| Scored match with a written reason | Free tier summaries, profile matching from £19 | Yes, on every match |
| Duplicates collapsed across portals | Not documented | |
| Renewal forecasting | Renewal watch, on £49 Pro | Incumbent, value, contract timing, recurrence confidence |
| Buyer intelligence | Buyer patterns from £19, awards from £49 | Spend, categories, top suppliers, contacts, how-to-win notes |
| Price benchmarks from past awards | Price benchmarks from comparable awards, winners and bid counts | |
| Official sources covered | Four | Five |
| Free tier | Free alerts, no card | Yes, search every notice free, no card |
Checked 2026-08-18. Vendors change tiers often, so confirm before you buy.
You have outgrown a keyword filter, you are losing time to duplicates across five portals, and you want warning of a renewal before the notice is published.
You want alerts pushed to you without paying anything at all. BidSkim's free plan will let you search everything, but it will not send you a daily email until you subscribe.
Worth knowing
BidSkim sells two plans and the comparison changes depending on which one you mean.
Tells you which live tenders deserve attention.
£79 a month, or £780 a year which works out at £65 a month
Monitor at £79 sits above TenderHawk Standard at £19 and Pro at £49. BidSkim reads five official sources against their four, and adds comparable award benchmarks.
Helps you plan before the tender goes live.
£189 a month, or £1,860 a year which works out at £155 a month
Predict at £189 adds comparable award benchmarks and buyer how-to-win notes. TenderHawk Pro at £49 does cover renewal watch and competitor analysis, so the gap is narrower than the price suggests.
| Focus | BidSkim | TenderHawk |
|---|---|---|
| Market | Britain, and only Britain | UK, four official sources, £0 to £49 |
| Built for | SMEs who have outgrown a keyword filter | Businesses trying public sector work for the first time |
The free plan does not send you anything.
It is a search tool, not an alert service. You can search every notice across the official sources in Britain and open the full detail on any of them without paying or entering a card, plus a twelve month look-back report showing what you already missed. What you pay for is the part that runs without you, daily scoring against your profile and the alert landing in your inbox. Searching is free because searching is not the hard problem. Remembering to search every morning is.
BidSkim does not summarise every notice it finds.
It scores first and briefs second. A summary of an irrelevant contract is still an irrelevant contract, and reading forty of them is the problem, not the solution.
Both are free to start with no card. TenderHawk's free tier sends alerts. BidSkim's free plan lets you search every notice across Britain and open full tender detail, and adds a twelve month look-back report, but it does not email you until you pay.
You do not have to pay to search, BidSkim's free plan covers every notice in Britain. You pay when you want it to run without you. People move when duplicates across five portals start costing time, when technically relevant matches keep being commercially wrong, and when they want warning of a renewal months before the notice appears.
Answer a few questions about what you do. Get a scored match report in minutes.