Paid Tender Alert Services Reviewed: Supply2Gov, Tenders Direct, Tracker and Who Actually Needs Them

Most small UK contractors do not need a paid tender alert service. The notices those services send are published free on Find a Tender and the devolved portals, and free email alerts cover them. Paid tools earn their fee in two cases only: you bid nationally across many buyers, or you want early warning of re-tenders before any notice exists.

I run a subcontracting model - win the work, sub the delivery, keep the spread - so I care about two things with any lead source: what it costs, and whether it shows me work my competitors cannot see. Paid tender alerts score badly on the second point by design. They are selling you the same public notices everyone else gets, faster and better sorted. Sometimes that is worth money. Usually it is not. Here is how the three names you will see most often actually work, what they cost, and the contract terms nobody reads until the renewal invoice lands.

What a tender alert service actually sells you#

Under the Procurement Act 2023, a public body in England, Wales or Northern Ireland that wants to award a below-threshold contract worth at least £12,000 including VAT (central government) or £30,000 including VAT (any other contracting authority) has to publish a notice on the central digital platform before it publishes anywhere else. Above-threshold work goes there too. You can search that platform free through Find a Tender, with saved searches and email notifications.

So the raw data is public and free. What you pay a service for is one or more of these:

• Aggregation - one feed covering the national platforms, the devolved portals and the long tail of buyer portals, instead of five logins.
• Filtering - better keyword and category matching than the government sites manage, so you see fewer irrelevant notices.
• Early warning - data on when current contracts end, so you hear about a re-tender months before the notice.
• Intelligence - who won what, at what value, and who your competitors are.

Hold every service up against that list. If it is only doing the first two for work in your own county, you are paying for convenience.

Supply2Gov: the one with the free plan#

Supply2Gov is run by BiP Solutions. It is the cheapest of the three and the only one with a genuinely free tier.

Plan	Monthly	Annual	Covers
Local Area	Free	Free	One postcode area plus your keywords
Country	£25	£270	Regions in one country
UK	£80	£499	The whole UK
UK and Ireland	£95	£899	UK plus the Republic of Ireland

Prices were checked on its pricing page on 9 October 2026; its terms say prices exclude VAT. The free plan gives you weekday email alerts for your area and access to CompeteFor supply chain opportunities. Note the gap between monthly and annual billing: the UK plan is £960 a year paid monthly against £499 paid upfront.

What customers say. When I checked on 9 October 2026, Supply2Gov had a Trustpilot score of 3.0 from 81 reviews, with 54% of them one-star and the profile marked as not replying to negative reviews. The recurring complaints were irrelevant or stale alerts (including closed tenders still showing as open), little of value until you pay for a wider area, and a clunky site. A couple of reviewers said they were moved onto a monthly subscription they had not expected. The positive reviews mostly say it is cheap and easy to set up. Only six reviews were from the last 12 months, so treat this as a pattern, not a verdict.

The terms to read before you pay. Supply2Gov's terms say a paid subscription continues for further periods after the first one until you downgrade, and that with a continuous payment authority you do not need to take any action to renew. It sends a reminder 14 days before the renewal date. To downgrade you put in a request through the online service; to cancel the payment authority you email support@supply2govtenders.co.uk. On a monthly plan, cancellation takes effect from the end of the following month's paid term - so you pay one more month. And unsubscribing from the alert emails does not end the contract, which is the trap: stopping the emails feels like cancelling, and it is not.

Verdict. Take the free Local Area plan. It is a reasonable second net behind Find a Tender. Only pay for a wider plan if you genuinely deliver across regions, and diary the renewal date the day you sign up.

Tenders Direct: paying for early warning#

Tenders Direct is run by Proactis Tenders Limited and is the premium end of this market. It advertises tender alerts from £1,359 a year. It offers a free trial.

The feature that justifies the price is Advance Tender Alerts. Tenders Direct tracks the end dates of current contracts and warns you 3, 6, 12 or 18 months before a contract is due to be re-let - before any tender notice exists. That is real value if you are going after a council's five-year repairs contract, because the firms who win re-tenders are usually the ones who were talking to the buyer, or to the incumbent's supply chain, long before the notice dropped. But Advance Tender Alerts are only in the Core and Premium subscriptions, not the entry plan, so the £1,359 figure does not buy you the thing that makes Tenders Direct different.

What customers say. Tenders Direct scored 4.7 from 231 Trustpilot reviews when I checked, and the company replies to almost every review. The visible complaints were about usability, cheaper competitors, and notices being miscategorised after the Procurement Act came in.

The terms to read before you pay. This is where it gets serious. The annual contract renews automatically each year on your subscription date. The renewal invoice is sent 28 days before your term ends, and you can cancel by giving notice within 30 days of the invoice date - miss that and you have accepted the renewal. There is no cooling off period. Cancelling mid-term is at the company's discretion and carries a £299 plus VAT administration charge. And the price can rise on renewal by up to 10% a year. None of that is unusual for B2B software, but on a four-figure subscription a missed invoice email costs real money.

Verdict. Worth it for a firm that bids for multi-year public contracts every month and has someone whose job is bid management. Not worth it for a two-van outfit picking up the odd council job.

Tracker: market intelligence, priced on a call#

Tracker is another BiP Solutions product. It publishes no prices: four tiers (from one user up to five plus an API), a three-day free trial, and everything else through sales. It describes itself as pulling from over 90 portals and adds market intelligence and, on higher tiers, frameworks and leads.

The terms to read before you pay. Tracker's terms set a minimum period of one year after the trial, renew automatically for the same term at the current price list, and require you to cancel at least 30 days before renewal by emailing cancellations@bipsolutions.com. Once a period is paid, no refunds. Its Trustpilot profile had only two reviews when I checked, both one-star and both about renewals - too few to call a pattern, but enough to tell you to get the renewal date in writing.

Verdict. This is a tool for firms with a bid team analysing a market, not for finding next month's jobs.

The rest of the field, briefly#

You will also see these. Prices are as published on their own pages on 9 October 2026.

Service	Free tier	Published price	What it is for
Stotles	Yes - free tender tracking	Basic listed from £99 a month	Public sector search with expiring-contract data on paid plans
BidStats	Yes - 5 tender views a day, no email alerts	£350 a year	Cheapest published paid alert plan I found
Open Opportunities	7-day trial	£120 a month or £1,440 a year	Aggregated notices with a team plan
Tussell	No	Quote only	Spend and market intelligence, not job-finding
Barbour ABI, Glenigan	Trial or demo	Quote only	Construction project leads from planning stage, including private work - a different product from tender alerts

Of the 557 UK work sources in our directory, 20 are tender aggregators and lead services. Ten of those let you in free or on a free trial, seven are paid, and three only through a sales demo. That is the shape of the market: plenty of free doors to the same public notices, and the price climbing as you move from alerts to intelligence.

Are business auto-renewals legal?#

Yes. Most of the consumer protection you might be relying on does not apply when you sign up as a business. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 a consumer is an individual acting wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession - a sole trader buying tender alerts for the firm will usually fall outside that. The new subscription contract rules in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 are also written for contracts between a trader and a consumer. A business subscription is mainly governed by what you signed. This is not legal advice, but the practical rule is simple: read the renewal, notice and cancellation clauses before you pay, and put the cancellation deadline in your diary that day.

The free setup that covers most contractors#

This is what I would set up before paying anyone a penny. It takes an afternoon.

1. Find a Tender. Sign in with GOV.UK One Login, build saved searches for your trades and your area, and switch on email notifications. This is the primary source for new public procurements in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. If you are unsure what sits where, I covered it in Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder.
2. Contracts Finder. Keep its email updates running. It still carries older procurements and below-threshold English notices until authorities have to stop publishing them there on 1 May 2027.
3. The devolved portals, if you work there. Public Contracts Scotland has free supplier registration and alerts - see how to find council and housing association work in Scotland. In Wales it is Sell2Wales - see finding public and housing association work in Wales. In Northern Ireland, register on eTendersNI.
4. Your local buyer portals. Many councils and landlords run the tender itself on ProContract, Delta, In-tend or similar. Registration is free and you get that buyer's notifications directly. How to register on council procurement portals walks through them.
5. Supply2Gov's free Local Area plan as a safety net for anything the others miss locally.

How to get early warning without paying for it#

Advance re-tender alerts are the one feature I would genuinely pay for, so it is worth knowing you can build a rougher version yourself.

• Pipeline notices. Under section 93 of the Procurement Act 2023, any contracting authority expecting to spend more than £100 million in the coming financial year has to publish a pipeline notice listing the contracts over £2 million it plans to tender in the next 18 months. Big councils, NHS trusts and central departments publish them on Find a Tender within 56 days of the start of their financial year. That is a free 18-month forward look at the larger work, and the main contractors who will win it are the ones you want to be subbing for.
• Award and contract details notices. When a contract is awarded, the notice tells you who won it and for how long. Keep a simple spreadsheet of awards in your trade and area with the end dates, and you have your own re-tender diary. It also tells you which firm now needs a supply chain for the next few years - Contractor Club's guide to the award-notice play covers how to approach them (Contractor Club is run by the same team as this site).

None of this is as polished as a paid feed. It does not need to be. You are tracking a few dozen buyers, not the whole country.

Who actually needs a paid tender alert service#

You probably do not if: you work within an hour or two of base, you bid a handful of public jobs a year, most of your work comes from main contractors, landlords or managing agents rather than open tenders, or you do not yet have the accreditations and accounts to pass a selection questionnaire. Fix that last one first - CHAS vs Constructionline vs SMAS vs SafeContractor compares the badges buyers filter by, and the jargon is unpacked in construction procurement terms explained.

You might if: you bid nationally or across several regions every month, a missed tender costs you more than the subscription, you have someone who will actually work the alerts every day, or you are chasing multi-year frameworks where knowing the re-tender date 12 months out changes the outcome.

Whatever you choose: trial first, pay annually only once you know you will use it, read the renewal clause, and set a diary reminder for the cancellation deadline, not the renewal date.

Where the margin actually is#

Here is the part the alert services cannot sell you. Every notice they send is, by definition, a public notice. Every competitor with a free Find a Tender account sees it too, and open tenders get priced down accordingly. The work with real margin in my model sits behind doors that never produce an alert: housing association approved supplier lists, managing agents' contractor panels, insurance repair networks, and main contractors' supply chain registrations. In our directory, 167 of the 557 UK routes sit in those private categories, and not one of them will ever appear in a tender alert email.

That is the point of construction arbitrage: find the buyers who need reliable delivery, get through their door, and sub the work to people you trust. A tender alert is one door among many - and it is the busiest one. For the whole map, start with where to find construction contracts in the UK.

A note on the numbers: prices, plan contents and contract terms were read from each provider's own pricing and terms pages on 9 October 2026. Trustpilot scores were checked the same day and move constantly. Thresholds and the pipeline notice duty were checked against gov.uk guidance and the Procurement Act 2023. Directory counts are from our database of 557 UK work sources. Providers change their prices and terms; if one has changed since, its own page beats this post. I have no commercial relationship with any service named here.

Last checked: 9 October 2026.