87.4% of federal contract money was never available to you as a bidder.
Not lost to a better bid.
Never in play.
Most of it was ordered against agreements that already existed. Contracts somebody else won, sometimes years before you'd heard of the work. The rest was handed to a company by name, with nobody asked for a price. Spoken for before the notice ever reached your screen.
Every list in this market is built on the same SAM.gov feed.
Free or paid, they all show you the same 341 notices as open bids. They're already spoken for. Not winnable. A blind waste of your time.
And it isn't only the money you never saw. Nothing on those notices says so. The portal takes your bid like any other. You'd write the whole proposal for nothing. Days of it.
We show you what to skip, and where the odds are in your favor.
See today's board, free → Every open notice in your code. The odds on each are the part I sell.
Type in your six digits. Watch what happens.
Your own market, on screen, before you give us anything. No account. No card.
Show me the odds on every one of these → Seven days of the whole thing before a card is charged.
Nothing open in that code today. Codes go quiet for weeks at a time. The board keeps watching it either way.
Open the board → Free. Every notice, every buyer, every price.
Come in from my email and the board already knows you: the whole list, all the way to the end, nothing asked. A stranger off the internet gets three rows and a box for an email address before the rest opens. No password, no card, either way.
Here's this morning's board. Start with the first two rows.
A random pull, not hand-picked, not a mock-up. Both of the first two show as open and taking bids. One is worth clearing your week for. The other is a crowd you'd lose to. Nothing on the notices tells you which is which. Two rows further down have the numbers masked. That's the part you'd be paying for.
Now look at the last one. It reads like an opportunity, and every other list in this market would show it to you as one. It's a renewal. It already has a name on it. That single row is the whole product.
Where the 87.4% comes from.
$40.8B is still sitting there. Open. Unclaimed.
Nobody has taken it because nobody has had a way to crunch the whole board, every buyer's record included, down to the handful that are highly winnable for you specifically.
Same effort. Same you.
Pointed where you can actually win.
So you register. You watch your code. You bid, carefully, and you lose, and after a while you start wondering whether you're good enough. You were probably good enough. You were aiming at money that had already left the building.
Five things no other tool will tell you.
FedScout, HigherGov and GovWin will all find you more notices than you can read. Finding them was never what cost you anything. Picking the wrong ones is. Every row on our board answers five questions none of them ask.
When we've got no history on a buyer and a category, you get no number. Not a hedge. Not a guess with a wide band around it. Nothing. That's 67 notices today. We publish the score behind every number on this page, by tier, measured against contracts that have since been awarded, and we update it when it moves against us. Read our record →
The board shows you every notice. The subscription shows you which ones you'll actually win. Start here →
Or don't look at all. We'll do the looking.
Tuesday morning. One email on your phone before the coffee's done. Five contracts. Not two hundred. Five. Each with the reason it's there, the name of the person who posts for that office, and what work like it has actually paid.
A real report, built by the same machinery for a small firm in NAICS 238210. The firm is anonymised; the two things a subscriber pays for are masked.
This time I read 1,073 live notices in your 8 codes and the 31 codes firms like yours also win in.
551 of them are genuinely open to an outside bidder. The other 522 are already promised to a named company, whatever the notice says.
119 of those carry better than even odds of drawing two bids or less.
Why this one: .
TRS-3D /AN/SPS-75 Radar repairs/ overhaul services
▉▉% chance it draws two bids or less, from 19 of that buyer’s past orders for this kind of work.
Comparable work has paid $3k–$34k.
Questions go to ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉ ▉▉▉▉.
… and 4 more like it, each with its own reason.
To find those five we read every new notice in your codes, in the codes firms like yours also win in (that's where we turn up work you never knew existed), and in the product codes you've already been paid under. Then we throw almost all of it away, in this order:
What's left gets ranked, and every item carries the reason it beat the others. You see the whole count every time: this many came in, this many were open to you, these five cleared your bar. A short list never means we looked less. It means we cut more.
Two promises that hold on the thin weeks
- A quiet week gets you silence. Nothing clears, nothing arrives. No digest, no "not much this week" email. Three empty runs and it's me who gets the warning, not you.
- We stop at what you can actually deliver. Tell us you can carry three jobs at once and you get three, on the morning eight cleared the bar.
Your first one is built from your federal award record on its own. Your history already names your codes, your buyers, and the size of job you take. Then eight questions on your account page make it yours: what you actually make, how many jobs you can carry, where you won't go.
What it costs, and when not to buy it.
Think back over the last year of proposals. Some of them went to contracts that were already spoken for before you opened the notice. The portal took your bid and sent a confirmation. Nobody on the other end was reading it.
Whatever a proposal costs you, a weekend or a month with your best people locked in a room, you know that number better than we ever will. Now count how many of them went to work that was never yours to win. You can't. Nothing on the notice told you. That's the money walking out of your business every quarter, and it's the one number on this page we can't count for you. It is the one we can stop.
Ready to spend your next proposal on a contract that's actually yours to win?
Only bid a few times a year?
Then buy the report when you're ready to bid. $124, once, no subscription. We build the next morning's run for your firm and send it: the five best contracts open to you that day, each with the reason it's there, who posts for that office, and what work like it has paid. Come back whenever the next one's due.
It's the same report a subscriber gets. Not a sample, not a teaser. And if we can't find you anything worth your time, you don't pay.
Next page asks the same two-minute questions a subscriber answers, so the report is built for your firm, not your industry code. Nothing is charged until Stripe's page; if we have nothing to build from, we say so before you pay.
No sales call. No contract. Stop either one whenever you like. And when your code goes quiet for the season, you can set the subscription to pause itself until the work comes back.
And if a search tool is what you need, buy the search tool. FedScout starts at $20 a month and HigherGov's Starter tier is $41.67. Both will show you everything in your code, and they'll show it to you whether or not you could ever win it. That's the job they do. Ours is the opposite: we put you in front of the handful you can actually win and get the rest out of your way. If more data is what you're short of, we aren't your answer, and I'd rather say so now than take your money for a month.
Where the headline comes from.
Of $324.1B recorded so far in FY2026, $252.2B was ordered against agreements that already existed.
Of what was left, 43.2% went out with no competition at all. Sole source. Brand name. Or a buy too small to post.
That leaves roughly $40.8B ever up for a fair fight.
That last figure is an estimate: it applies the measured no-competition rate to the openly biddable slice. The year's total is still filling in, because awards reach the archive late. The percentages hold steady year to year.
Source: SAM.gov contract opportunities and the FPDS award archives, both public domain. Every figure on this page is recounted nightly.