WinAContract vs Find a Tender Service

What Find a Tender Service is

Find a Tender Service (FTS) is the UK government's official portal for above-threshold public-sector contracts. Launched January 2021, it replaced the EU Official Journal (OJEU) following Brexit. Publication on FTS is mandatory for contracts above UK statutory thresholds — approximately £138,760 for supplies and services, £5,372,609 for works, and £663,540 for Light Touch regime services.

FTS is run by the Cabinet Office and hosted at find-tender.service.gov.uk. It's entirely free, with an OCDS (Open Contracting Data Standard) feed available for developers.

What FTS does NOT cover

This is the key limitation: FTS only shows ABOVE-THRESHOLD contracts. Most UK public spending happens below threshold — £12k-£139k central government, £30k-£139k other public bodies — and those contracts are on Contracts Finder, not FTS.

Estimate: roughly 70% of UK public-sector tenders by count are below-threshold. If you only check FTS, you see maybe 30% of the market.

FTS also doesn't replicate devolved portals. Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish contracts are on Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, and eTendersNI respectively.

When FTS is enough

If you exclusively bid for large contracts (above ~£139k) and mainly in England, FTS covers your market. Works contractors chasing £5M+ capital projects will find most of their relevant tenders here.

• Your delivery capacity is £200k+ per contract minimum.
• You're comfortable with RSS feeds or manual daily portal checking.
• You don't need below-threshold visibility.
• You don't need Scottish, Welsh, or NI coverage.

When you need a Find a Tender alternative

Most suppliers find FTS alone is insufficient. Specific triggers that push suppliers to aggregators like WinAContract:

• Missing below-threshold contracts — you're losing mid-size opportunities (£50k-£150k) because they never appear on FTS.
• Devolved coverage gaps — you work with Scottish or Welsh buyers and have to check portals separately.
• RSS is useless — you can't get reliable email alerts, and your team isn't going to check an RSS feed daily.
• UI speed — FTS's filtering UI hasn't been materially updated. Complex searches are slow.
• No buyer intelligence — FTS doesn't tell you what a buyer typically spends, who currently holds their contracts, or when those contracts expire.

Should I use FTS alongside WinAContract?

Yes — there's no reason not to. Both are free at the basic level. The practical workflow:

• 1. Use WinAContract for daily monitoring — keyword alerts cover all 5 portals in one email.
• 2. Click through to FTS when needed — WinAContract links directly to the official source for every notice, so you can verify or download official docs.
• 3. Use FTS for compliance-critical references — if you need to cite a contract notice for audit/compliance, cite the FTS URL.

Frequently asked questions