OpenTender: Open-Source Tender Qualification and Bid/No-Bid Software

Decide whether you can bid, before anyone writes a word of the bid. Most tender tools help you write faster, but writing was never what lost the bid. One mandatory certificate you do not hold, found on the afternoon of the deadline, was. OpenTender reads the pack against what your company can actually evidence and tells you go or no-go, naming the single requirement that decided it.

An open-source app template provided by Clawnify.

See it in action

Conceptual UI illustrations of the app's main capabilities, with fictional example data. Open an image to see the details.

The bid/no-bid call	Evidence, not assertion
The second read	Answered once, reused every time

What it does

• Loads a standard question set as rows. The bundled UK pack is the Cabinet Office's own Annex B (PPN 03/24), with its source, publication date and licence recorded next to it. Start from it and delete what this tender does not ask for.
• Keeps the two halves of the decision apart. What the buyer demands is read out of their documents. What you can prove lives in a profile you fill in once and reuse on every tender. A requirement is only cleared when both exist.
• Refuses a citation it cannot find. Every answer must carry a quote copied from the pack. The app locates that quote in the extracted text before storing the answer; one it cannot find is shown as unresolved, never as an answer. The check is mechanical, so no amount of prompt drift weakens it.
• Never stores the verdict. It is recomputed from the evidence on every read, so it cannot quietly disagree with the rows underneath it.
• Double-checks the one answer it cannot verify. "This tender does not ask for that" is the only status with no quote behind it, so it is the only way to clear a mandatory requirement on an assertion. One button re-reads the pack for exactly those rows and puts back anything the text does impose after all, naming the page. A flagged row returns to unresolved, never to failed.
• Counts both deadlines. Submission, and the clarification window. The second one is the quieter loss: once it closes, an ambiguous requirement can no longer be asked about, only guessed at.
• Records what you actually decided. Teams bid on a technical no-go, and walk away from a clean go, for reasons no question set models. That goes in a note, not into editing the findings until the machine agrees.

Who reads the pack

Your agent does. The app owns the record and the evidence check; reading three hundred pages of procurement prose is judgment work that takes minutes, so it runs on your agent and reports back through this app's own API. agent.md is the contract it follows.

If no agent is reachable, the app hands you the same brief to paste into a chat. It never becomes a dead end.

Running it locally

pnpm install
pnpm dev          # UI on :5173, API on :8789
node demo/seed.mjs  # optional: fictional data to click around

pnpm dev needs Node 22 or later.

The double-check reads an OPENROUTER_API_KEY. On a deployed app it is resolved for you and nothing needs doing. Locally, put it in .clawnify/.dev.vars, not in the project root: the dev command generates its config inside .clawnify/ and secrets are read from beside that config. Leave the key out entirely and everything else works; the double-check reports itself as unavailable rather than failing.

Deploy

Use the button above, or from a checkout:

pnpm deploy

How it is put together

• UI: React and Vite, with a token layer in src/client/styles.css. Every colour and radius resolves through it, so rebranding is that one file.
• API: a Hono app in src/server/index.ts, self-describing at /api/openapi.json and /llms.txt.
• Storage: a SQLite database per deployment (schema.sql), and object storage for the original files.
• The parts worth reading: src/server/citations.ts is the quote check, src/server/verdict.ts is the bid/no-bid rule, and src/server/decisions.ts is the second read. All three are small, commented, and covered by tests (pnpm test).

Adding a jurisdiction

A pack is one entry in src/server/packs.gen.json: an id, a name, its provenance, and a list of requirements with a key, a family, an obligation and a hint that says what to look for. Add a pack, keep the provenance honest, and the rest of the app does not change.

The UK pack is reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.