United States (federal)
How to find US federal contract opportunities (and get alerted for free)
SAM.gov (System for Award Management) is the US government's single official portal for federal contracting opportunities, run by the General Services Administration. Every federal solicitation above the micro-purchase threshold has to be posted there, which makes it the authoritative source. Its own search and filtering can be slow to work with day to day.
What SAM.gov publishes
SAM.gov's Contract Opportunities section lists solicitations, presolicitations, combined synopsis/solicitations and sources-sought notices from federal agencies. Each listing includes the notice type, the posted and response-deadline dates, a NAICS code, the contracting office, and usually an attached description or the full solicitation package. SAM.gov also runs the entity registration system that contractors must complete separately before they can be awarded a federal contract.
The free alternatives
SAM.gov supports free saved searches with email notifications once you have a login.gov account, filterable by NAICS code, keyword, agency and place of performance. APEX Accelerators (the federally funded procurement assistance network, formerly PTACs) run free bid-matching services for registered small businesses in many states, built on the same SAM.gov data. If your business only targets federal work and you are willing to register directly and manage the alerts yourself, either route costs nothing.
How BidHeron's alerts work
We read new opportunity postings from the public SAM.gov API under a deliberately small daily call budget, well inside its published rate limits, so we never put our access at risk. Because of that budget, US federal notices arrive in daily batches rather than every two hours like the other sources. Notices are mapped from NAICS codes into our 25-category taxonomy alongside UK, EU and Canadian data. The free plan sends a weekly email. The $19 a month paid plan adds daily delivery, up to five saved alerts, and a fit score and reason for each match, which helps when a single day's SAM.gov postings run into the hundreds.
A federal-market caveat
Finding an opportunity is only the first step in US federal contracting. Most agencies expect vendors to hold an active SAM.gov entity registration (not just an account), and depending on the contract vehicle they may require certifications such as small business, 8(a) or SDVOSB. We surface the opportunity. Registration and certification still run entirely on SAM.gov and the related federal systems.
About the data
Source: SAM.gov (U.S. General Services Administration), public Get Opportunities API. Access: public-domain U.S. government data, read under a small daily request budget to respect SAM.gov's published rate limits. Update cadence: daily batches; category pages regenerate hourly; the status page shows the last successful read. BidHeron does not alter notice facts. Only the summary and fit score are our own generated content.
Questions people ask
- Is BidHeron affiliated with SAM.gov or the GSA?
- No. We are an independent service that reads SAM.gov's public API and republishes the same publicly available opportunity data in a normalised format, under SAM.gov's terms of use for public API data.
- Do I need a SAM.gov account to see opportunities on BidHeron?
- No. You can search and browse freely. You will need a SAM.gov entity registration to be awarded a federal contract, which is separate from your BidHeron account.
- Are there other free ways to track federal opportunities?
- Yes. SAM.gov's own saved searches and email alerts are free, and your local APEX Accelerator (formerly PTAC) office often runs a free bid-matching service for registered small businesses.
Source: SAM.gov (U.S. General Services Administration).