Can AI find government contracts a small business can actually bid?
Yes, and the valuable half is the rejection. Threshold scans eleven federal, state and local sources every day — all free or keyless, $0 in data costs — and scores every notice against a written profile of what the firm can and cannot legally bid. On its first run it triaged 26 notices: ten worth real bid hours, five structurally gated and flagged before anyone wasted a week. About $2,400 a year to run.
The situation
A small technology services firm entering the public-sector market with no past performance and no certifications — which is the position essentially every firm starts from, and the position the market is worst at serving.
The conventional entry path is a five-figure market-intelligence subscription plus a capture consultant on retainer. That is a rational spend for a company already winning federal work. It is an absurd one for a company trying to find out whether federal work is even available to it.
And the real cost is not the subscription. It is the bid hours. A small firm can lose a week writing a response to a solicitation it was never structurally eligible to win — a set-aside it does not qualify for, a past-performance requirement it cannot meet, a certification it does not hold. Nobody tells you until you have already spent the week.
What we built
Threshold reads eleven federal, state and local sources every single day. All of them are free or keyless, so the data cost is zero — the entire operating cost is compute and maintenance.
The core of it is not the scanning. It is the written eligibility profile: an explicit, maintained description of what this specific firm can and cannot legally bid. Every notice gets scored against that profile, and every verdict comes with a human-readable reason. Not a relevance score — a sentence explaining why.
Each morning it delivers a ranked brief: here is what is worth your bid hours, here is what is not, and here is why.
What it produced
| Result | What it was |
|---|---|
| 11 sources | Scanned daily, at $0 in data costs. |
| 26 notices | Triaged on the first run — 10 worth real bid hours, 5 structurally gated and flagged before anyone spent a week on them. |
| ~$2,400/yr | To run — 79–98% below the conventional intelligence-subscription-plus-consultant stack. |
| 1 working day | From nothing to its first ranked brief. |
Two first-week findings mattered more than the triage itself. One redirected the firm’s entire capability-investment plan — it changed what they decided to become good at. Another flagged a compliance exposure before it became a filing.
Straight talk
Threshold’s real product is the no. Telling you which opportunities you are structurally barred from, before you spend a single bid hour. That is unglamorous and it is where the money is.
It does not write the proposal. It tells you which door is worth knocking on. Walking through it is still work.
It does not create eligibility. If you need a certification you do not have, the scanner will tell you that clearly and repeatedly. Some firms find that discouraging. It is considerably cheaper than finding out in month four.
The cost comparison is against published market rates for intelligence subscriptions and capture consultants, not against an invoice we received.
Where this pattern fits
Any firm whose work is announced publicly and scattered across portals: government contractors, construction companies watching municipal, school district and county bid boards, and specialty trades chasing public infrastructure work. The pattern also transfers to grant notices and to any qualification-gated pipeline.
It fits badly if you already have a capture team and a subscription that works. This is an entry-cost solution, not a replacement for a mature business-development function.
Bring the bid board you cannot keep up with. The audit maps where your hours are going, ranks the top five fixes by return, and gives you a written plan — whether or not you build with us.
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