BidSonar
MCP server for UK/EU government contracts and grants
Details
- External ID
- 49419635
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- BidSonar
- Website domain
- bidsonar.com
- Launched
- Aug. 24, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4731182795698925
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
Yo HN - I built BidSonar, a free index of UK & EU public-sector contracts and grants, which today I just shipped an MCP server for.The data is all public, scattered across a bunch of gov portals - I built the platform a couple years back as an aggregator. I've been using the MCP side to keep an eye on contract/grant opportunities for my services business and our clients which I'm finding (not surprisingly) more effective than navigating the traditional UI.Data's under OGL and the EU TED reuse notice; not affiliated with any procurement body - free to use, you just need an account.For any SMBs I hope it helps find you an opportunity or two!
Enrichment
- Theme
- automated legal and compliance tools
- Vertical
- Government
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- government contracts search tool
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Creating an MCP server wrapper around an API is trivial, but building and continually scraping/normalizing procurement data across dozens of UK/EU government portals is a significant data engineering hurdle.
What it would actually take: The frontend/MCP layer is a standard TypeScript/FastAPI server implementing the Model Context Protocol with OAuth PKCE. The hard part is a resilient data pipeline scraping and normalizing disparate, messy procurement portals (TED/OJEU, Contracts Finder, Find a Tender) with custom extractors, deduplication, and schema normalization into PostgreSQL/Elasticsearch. Maintaining scrapers against changing government web portals and FOI/APIs requires ongoing data infrastructure work.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: US gov portal
Concerns raised: rate limits
Feature requests: port to show US contracts and grants, break up by sector
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 21 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 22 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 279 days after the earliest competitor.
- BidHeron · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Sell to State · ph · 2026-09-21 · 105 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once · hn · 2026-04-06 · 319 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- MCPfinder · hn · 2026-04-20 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- TrustSolo · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Captivaq · ph · 2026-09-21 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- MCP Harbor · hn · 2026-09-14 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- How we made MCP development feel good · hn · 2026-05-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.