FAQ
Both, structured as two parts. A one-time build fee covers designing, developing, and deploying your scraper. A monthly retainer then covers ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and keeping the pipeline running as portals change (hands-on right now, not yet fully automated — more on that below). The retainer is where the real value sits — you're getting a maintained service, not a static piece of code that quietly breaks in six months.
Yes. We can start with a paid pilot covering two or three of your priority portals, including monitoring and a defined maintenance window. At the end of it, you decide whether to move to a full retainer — no pressure either way.
We treat portal changes as our problem to catch, not yours to report. As an early-stage team, we're still building out fully automated monitoring, so right now that means direct, hands-on attention rather than a numeric uptime SLA we can't yet back up with a track record. We'd rather tell you that plainly than promise a number we haven't earned.
Yes, per portal. We choose whichever access method actually makes sense for that portal — weighing control, availability, efficiency, and ease of access — rather than defaulting to one approach. Legal considerations are always part of that judgment: we review the portal's terms of service before committing to it, and we won't take on a portal that explicitly prohibits automated access without a proper legal review and your sign-off first.
Procurement notices are public government documents, and named officials in them are disclosed in a professional capacity — that's a different legal basis than personal consumer data. We don't collect personal information beyond what's already in the published record, and we don't enrich it with anything from other sources. If your own product's use of that data raises separate compliance questions, that's worth a jurisdiction-specific legal opinion on your side.
Yes in substance — we don't share one client's implementation details, portal approach, or commercial terms with another. We're still formalizing a standard NDA template on our side, but we're glad to sign one you provide, or put a mutual NDA in place as part of onboarding if that matters to you.
We don't offer exclusivity by default — working across the space is part of what keeps us current on portals and formats. What we don't do is share implementation specifics or strategy across clients. If market exclusivity genuinely matters to you, it's something we can discuss directly rather than something we rule out.
Whatever your system expects. Structured JSON, direct writes to your database, CSV feeds, webhook events, or a connection to your existing API — we agree the format and schema during scoping, before any development starts.
An experienced data engineer is a real cost — high five to six figures loaded, months to hire, months more before they're productive specifically on procurement portals, which have their own quirks (authentication models, CPV codes, portal-specific pagination). We're already specialized in exactly that. And building the scraper is the easy 20% — maintaining it as portals change is the other 80%, which is the part an in-house engineer usually ends up resenting. That maintenance burden is the actual service we provide.
It's permanent, not a starting point. We've deliberately built specialization in tender portals, CPV/UNSPSC codes, and government data formats that doesn't transfer to other domains — and we're not trying to be generalists. That focus is exactly what lets us move faster and know the edge cases a general data agency wouldn't.