Frequently Asked Questions
What is Vendor Radar?
Vendor Radar is a government opportunity intelligence platform that monitors public meeting agendas, minutes, packets, budgets, capital improvement plans, and procurement pages from cities, counties, school districts, park boards, townships, and special districts. It extracts forward-looking project and contract signals — the kind that appear weeks or months before a formal solicitation posts. Read more about our methodology at How It Works.
Who is Vendor Radar for?
Vendor Radar is built for firms that sell expertise, services, or implementation work to local government — civil and municipal engineering, landscape architecture, environmental consulting, water and sewer contractors, general and specialty construction, HVAC and mechanical contractors, IT services, and related disciplines. If your business depends on knowing which public bodies are about to need what you sell, Vendor Radar gives you that lead time.
How does Vendor Radar find signals?
Vendor Radar runs nightly scraping cycles across hundreds of government websites, meeting portals, agenda management systems, and procurement pages. Documents are processed through a multi-stage extraction pipeline that identifies signal types — project planning, budget approval, funding authorization, contract expiration, RFP posting, consultant selection, and more — and tags each signal with service category, source document, government body, and meeting date. Every published signal links back to its source document. See real examples at source-to-signal examples.
How is Vendor Radar different from a bid board?
Bid boards show formal solicitations after they post. By the time you find it there, so has every competitor. Vendor Radar watches earlier public-record signals — project planning discussions, feasibility study authorizations, capital improvement allocations, funding awards, contract expirations, and committee minutes — so you can start the conversation before a formal RFP appears. Read the full comparison at Vendor Radar vs. bid boards.
How is Vendor Radar different from broad SLED platforms like GovWin or GovSpend?
National SLED platforms focus on federal and large-state procurement databases. Vendor Radar focuses exclusively on local government — the cities, counties, school districts, and special districts that don't post to national databases. Our source-family knowledge, body-by-body maturity tracking, and document-level provenance give you granular early signals that broad platforms simply don't capture. Read the full comparison at Vendor Radar vs. SLED platforms.
What areas does Vendor Radar cover?
Vendor Radar monitors local government entities across Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Coverage includes cities, counties, school districts, park boards, townships, water districts, and other special-purpose bodies. See the full breakdown at coverage map.
What types of signals does Vendor Radar surface?
Signal types include: project planning and feasibility, budget approval and capital improvement, funding authorization and grant awards, contract expiration and renewal, active RFPs and solicitations, consultant and vendor selection, bid awards, and rebid opportunities. Each signal is classified by type and tagged with the service categories it is most relevant to.
How fresh are the signals?
Vendor Radar runs nightly scraping and extraction cycles. Signals from documents posted or updated today are typically available in your dashboard and digest within 24 hours. We enforce a hard minimum-date floor on document recency to filter out stale archives and historical backfill.
Can I verify where a signal came from?
Yes. Every published signal includes a provenance trail: the government body name, source document title, document URL, document date, and meeting date when available. You can click through to the original public document to verify any signal before acting on it.
How are signals delivered?
Customers review matched signals in the Vendor Radar dashboard, which supports filtering by state, county, government body, service category, and signal type. Email digests are sent based on your service categories and geographic territories. You can also share individual signals with colleagues or export them for use in your BD pipeline.
How much does Vendor Radar cost?
Vendor Radar offers a free tier that monitors one city government body indefinitely — no credit card required. Paid plans start at $149/month for regional coverage and $249/month for full statewide access. Additional states are $99/month each. See pricing at pricing.
What if a signal is wrong or irrelevant?
Vendor Radar enforces suppression discipline: signals that fail quality checks, duplicate existing entries, or lack forward-looking relevance are suppressed before they reach your dashboard. If something does slip through, you can flag it and our extraction pipeline learns from corrections. Source faithfulness and provenance matter more to us than volume.