BidSonar
MCP server for UK/EU government contracts and grants
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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!
HN · launched Aug 24, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 53%) · 0 views
Niche: government contracting intelligence platforms · 51 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▲ +17% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Government
- Search & retrieval
- B2B
- AI feature
- Commercial product
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More like this: all 51 launches in government contracting intelligence platforms →
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 : 54 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #20 of 55 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 279 days after the earliest competitor.
- Bidstage · ph · 2026-11-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- MCP Bids · ph · 2026-11-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- TenderMCP · ph · 2026-10-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- BidHeron · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- GovBidFit · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Sell to State · ph · 2026-09-21 · 105 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Government Tenders SA · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- PublicBidSearch · ph · 2026-10-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
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