How to access EU & French public tenders via API (free, no auth required)

#api #webdev #python #opensource

Every year, 50,000+ public procurement notices are published in France and across the EU. Most developers trying to build tender monitoring tools waste days scraping fragile government websites that break without warning.

There's a better way. And it's completely free.

The official sources nobody talks about

Both BOAMP (France's official public procurement bulletin) and TED (Tenders Electronic Daily - the EU's official source) have free, documented APIs that require zero authentication. No API key, no registration, no rate limit headaches.

BOAMP: powered by Opendatasoft, returns clean JSON
TED API v3: official EU endpoint covering all 27 member states

Together they represent ~50,000 new notices per year for France alone.

The problem with using them directly

The raw APIs return inconsistent formats, buried budget fields, opaque deadline structures, and no sector labeling. You end up writing 200 lines of parsing code before you can do anything useful.

What I built

I built Tender Intelligence API. A unified wrapper around both sources that gives you structured, clean data per tender:

Field	Example
Title	"IT infrastructure maintenance"
Buyer	City of Lyon
Budget	120,000 €
Deadline	Oct 15 (44 days left)
Sector	IT / Software
Source	BOAMP / TED

Quick example in Python

import requests

url = "https://tender-intelligence.p.rapidapi.com/search"
headers = {"X-RapidAPI-Key": "YOUR_KEY"}
params = {"q": "informatique"}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, params=params)
tenders = response.json()

for t in tenders["results"]:
    print(f"{t['title']} — {t['budget']} — {t['days_left']} days left")