TenderFinder, the tender portal built for small business

TenderFinder is a South African tender portal built for small business. We gather government tenders, RFQs and related notices into one searchable place, send you email alerts for the ones that match what you do, and remind you before the closing date arrives.

We are an independent service. We are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the National Treasury or any organ of state. We simply take public procurement information that is hard to keep up with, and make it easy to keep up with.

The problem we set out to fix

Big firms have bid offices that watch the tender bulletin all day. Your business has you. By the time a tender reaches you through word of mouth or a WhatsApp group, the closing date is often days away and the documents are somewhere you cannot find them.

TenderFinder closes that gap. You tell us your provinces, categories and keywords once, and matching tenders come to you instead of you going hunting for them. There is no procurement jargon and no training required: if you can use email, you can use TenderFinder.

Where the tenders come from

Our listings come from the National Treasury eTenders data, which is public information. We pull the advertised tender feed first, because it carries the complete document list for each tender, and fall back to the open procurement API when we need to. The live feed refreshes every 30 minutes throughout the day, and we keep a bundled snapshot of real tender data so pages still load instantly when a government server is slow.

Coverage runs across all 9 provinces plus national departments, in 28 tender categories, from large construction contracts down to the smaller RFQs that make realistic first wins. Right now there are 1 812 tenders open. We also keep recently closed and cancelled tenders from the last 90 days, and on Pro you can see the past year of awarded tenders: who won, and for how much.

Everything stays on our site

Most tender services hand you a link and leave you to fight with someone else's portal. We do the opposite. Every tender document link is rewritten to run through TenderFinder, so when you open a bid pack, a briefing note or a specification, it downloads from tenderfinder.co.za and you never get bounced to another site.

That means one login, one place to search, one place to save the tenders you are chasing, and no portal-hopping in the middle of preparing a bid.

Who it is for

TenderFinder is built for small and medium businesses, not procurement departments. That means contractors, cleaning and security companies, caterers, transport operators, IT and professional services firms, and suppliers of goods: anyone who could win government work but does not have someone whose full-time job is watching for it.

Pricing is in rand, billing runs through PayFast, and you can cancel at any time from your settings. Pro supports up to 3 users, so a small team can share the same tender pipeline.

How we think about pricing

Start free and pay nothing. The Free plan lets you view 25 tender listings a day, open 2 full tenders a day, follow 1 province and 1 category so those come up first, and receive a daily tender email. Tender data is 48 hours behind and adverts are shown. It is deliberately enough to judge whether the tenders in your line of work are worth chasing, before you spend a cent.

When it starts paying for itself, upgrade. Starter is R79 a month, or R699 a year (about R58 a month), and gives you unlimited browsing with no data delay, all 9 provinces and every category, an email alert checked hourly, closing-date reminders, full tender documents and no adverts. Pro is R129 a month, or R1,099 a year (about R92 a month), and adds up to 10 alerts, delivery to up to 5 email addresses, awarded-tender intelligence, unlimited saved tenders, CSV export and 5 AI tender analyses a day. One won tender covers years of either.