Tender alerts for UK MSPs and small IT firms: what to set up, and what to ignore

Portal alerts are not broken. They are unfiltered, and they are unfiltered in five specific ways. If you recognise all five, you already know the problem better than any marketing copy about it.

• They match the word, not the work. A keyword alert on “software” will send you a national programme and a small website rebuild with equal enthusiasm. “Network” finds water networks as happily as data networks. The alert has no idea which one you can deliver — it has never seen your business.
• They are national by default. Both main portals let you narrow by region and by value, but only if you go and set it. An alert you left at its defaults will send you work you cannot travel to.
• They include things that are not opportunities. Award notices for contracts that have already been let, prior-information notices about work months away, and notices where the words you searched for appear in a category code rather than in the work. You learn to skim. Then you learn to skip.
• They arrive when the buyer publishes, not when it is useful to you. A notice published with a two-week deadline reached you the moment it existed — and it still sat unread for three days, because it was the eleventh email of that morning. Timing matters as much as selection.
• Nothing in the chain knows what you do not do. This is the one no notification setting can fix. A portal can filter by region, category, value and keyword. It cannot filter on “we are fourteen people and we do not do data-centre migrations”. That is a judgement about your business, and it is the only thing we are actually selling (see the comparison below).

There are only three realistic options, and they are not really competing at the same job. Here is each one described as plainly as we can, including where it beats us.

This is free, it takes about ten minutes per portal, and it is worth doing even if you never buy anything from us. There is a fuller, step-by-step version on the council IT tenders page.

1. Register on Contracts Finder. GOV.UK states that an account gets you email updates and saved searches — and that you can still search and apply without one.
2. Register on Find a Tender with a GOV.UK One Login, then register a supplier organisation. Its own list of what an account gives you is: register a supplier organisation, save search criteria, and sign up for notifications via email.
3. Set two kinds of alert, not one: one on the words you would use yourself, and one on the CPV categories for what you sell. Notices whose titles do not contain your words still carry the category codes — the live notices in section 4 include categories like “72212224 web page editing software development services” and “72268000 software supply services”.
4. Narrow by region and by value on the first screen of the saved search, not later.
5. Keep the number of alerts small enough that you read them. One alert you open is worth more than five you mute.
6. Do the same on the portal for your part of the UK: Public Contracts Scotland (free registration for suppliers or buyers), Sell2Wales (complete the Alerts Profile, which the site says is what produces email alerts matching your business), or eTendersNI for Northern Ireland.

Here is what the filtered output actually looks like — the current snapshot we hold.

It does

• Send one email a week, every Tuesday, with a short shortlist of live UK and US public-sector notices in every category, filtered to what you bid for.
• Filter on the things you tell us: the UK regions you work in, your sector focus and an optional minimum contract value. Change them any time by replying to the brief.
• Give you, for each notice, the buyer, the closing date, the published estimated value where the buyer published one, and a one-line reason it fits — our judgement, labelled as ours, so you can disagree with it.
• Link every notice to the official page on the buyer’s own site, with no markup and nothing between you and the buyer.
• Stop when you ask it to. Cancel any time by replying to the brief; you keep the period you have already paid for.

It does not

• It is not a portal and does not host notices. It is a summary of notices that are published elsewhere, for free.
• It does not sell access. There is no such thing to sell — see the honest sentence in section 2.
• It is not a bid-writing or bid-management service, and there is no bid support on offer. If that is the gap in your business, buy that instead.
• It does not introduce you to buyers, recommend you, or act as your agent with anyone.
• It does not guarantee you a win, a bid, or a reply. Nobody can, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
• It does not run on your inbox. One email a week, and no follow-up sequence.

A weekly email. It reads the same free, public notices you have just read about — Contracts Finder, Find a Tender and the devolved portals — and sends only a focused list of the ones that plausibly suit a small supplier like you. These pages are written for IT firms, MSPs and cyber consultancies because that is where we started; the brief itself covers every category a public body buys, and each notice carries its category. For each one you get the buyer, the closing date, the published value where the buyer published one, a one-line reason it fits, and a link to the official notice. UK notices are live today, and so are the US ones: federal opportunities from SAM.gov, plus local bids — city and metro from New York City’s City Record and Los Angeles’ RAMP marketplace, and statewide from Illinois’ BidBuy portal — all in the same brief and each labelled with the market it came from.

The notices themselves are free and public, and they always will be. Nobody needs TenderPulse to read them, and nothing here is behind a paywall. What is being sold is the filtering — the ten minutes a week and the judgement about which notices are worth opening — and nothing else.