Automatic, on a schedule, from four public sources
A scheduler runs every five minutes and works through a queue of small jobs. Once a day it plans the day's reads. Nothing is typed in by hand, nothing is scraped from screens, and AI never touches the pull: it reads the records after they are in.
What happens every day
- 1
Every five minutes: the queue moves
A cron hit runs up to fifty seconds of queued work: one page of one job at a time, so a shared host is never asked for more than it can give. Jobs are small on purpose: one week of notices, one fiscal year of one NAICS subsector, one day of the FPDS feed, one state of the registry.
- 2
Once a day: the daily plan
The engine queues the day: award changes by sector from USASpending (anything modified in the last four days), the last two days of notices from SAM.gov, three days of the FPDS feed, assistance changes nationwide, then the award detail pass, vendor resolution, recompete scoring, the stats rebuild, classification, saved-search alerts and the email digests.
- 3
In the background: the ten-year history
The backfill is one job per NAICS subsector per fiscal year, newest fiscal year first across every sector, so the most recent years are complete for every code before older years arrive. It runs until it is done and pauses at the storage cap if the database fills, keeping the newest years intact.
- 4
After the pull: AI, only on request
AI writes the plain-English brief of a notice when a member asks, turns a typed question into a search, tags notices by work type, and writes the short summary on a code page. It is metered by a daily budget, and every number it describes comes from the record, never from the model.
The four sources, what each gives, how often, what it costs
| Source | What it provides | How it is read | Freshness | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAM.gov opportunities API | Every contract notice: solicitations, combined synopses, sources sought, presolicitations, special notices, justifications, award notices. Attachments and points of contact as published. | One request per thousand notices, by posting date. The full text of an open notice is pulled separately, watched codes first. | Daily; SAM.gov posts the same day. A notice leaves the open list two days after its deadline. | Free. A personal key gets about 10 requests a day; a key on a registered entity role gets about 1,000. |
| USASpending contracts | Every contract award at every agency: vendor, buyer, NAICS, PSC, value, dates, place of performance. Award detail adds competition, offers, options, the contracting office. | One page of a hundred awards per request, by subsector and fiscal year for history, by modification date for daily changes. | Nightly. USASpending publishes with a lag of days to a few weeks. | Free, no key. |
| FPDS ATOM feed | The newest contract actions before USASpending publishes them, with the office, set-aside and competition fields. | Ten actions per page, by day, folded into the USASpending record once it appears. | Daily, three days back. | Free, no key. |
| USASpending assistance | Grants and cooperative agreements: recipient, program (assistance listing), agency, value, dates, recipient state. | One page of a hundred awards per request, by recipient state and fiscal year, newest first; daily by modification date. | Nightly. | Free, no key. |
| SAM.gov entity API | Active registrations: business name, UEI, CAGE, address, NAICS list, small business programs. | One request per hundred registrations, by state. | Weekly refresh once loaded. | Free, same key as notices. |
The only metered cost in the system is the AI key, at the daily budget the site owner sets; at the default budget on a small model it is on the order of a few dollars a month. Hosting is the site's own plan.
What SAM.gov is, and what this site covers of it
SAM.gov is several systems under one roof. Here is how each maps to this site.
- Contract Opportunities: covered in full. Every notice, every type, every code, every agency. See open notices.
- Entity Information: registrations are covered (the SAM registrant directory, and the identity of every vendor on the award record). Exclusions (debarments) are not pulled; the SAM.gov exclusion search is the authority there.
- Federal Hierarchy: covered by the agency pages and the buying office directory, built from the awards rather than from the hierarchy file, so an office appears once it has awarded something.
- Federal Assistance: covered as awarded assistance on the grants page, from USASpending. Open funding opportunities are on Grants.gov, which this site links to rather than duplicates.
- Contract Data (the award reporting SAM.gov took over from FPDS): covered through USASpending and the FPDS feed, which carry the same records.
- Wage Determinations: out of scope on purpose. A labor-rate lookup for service and construction contracts, best used at the source when you price a bid. SAM.gov wage determinations.
- FASCSA orders: out of scope. A short list of supply-chain exclusion orders that matter when you are the buyer. SAM.gov FASCSA.
- Entity Reporting (subaward and executive compensation reporting): a contractor's own reporting portal; there is nothing public to organize. Subawards themselves are published by USASpending and are on the roadmap.
What is not automatic
Three things need a person. Entity merges above a confidence threshold are proposed by the engine and confirmed by hand. The storage cap, the floor amount and the years of history are decisions the site owner makes once. And the written guides on this site are written, not generated.
Everything else, from the first page of the backfill to the morning digest, runs without anyone touching it. The status page and the Data status view in the app show when each source last came in.
The boundary
Nothing enters this system from any employer, any private contact list, any conversation, or any document that is not a public federal record. The pull is designed so that it cannot.
See who was last awarded in your NAICS
The free report shows who bought your part category, who won, and what is coming up for recompete.