We Built a Free AI Tool That Tells You Whether to Bid

#ai #opensource #devtools #procurement

You're staring at a tender. £2M/year, five years, NHS trust. Looks good on paper. The deadline is six weeks out and your team can probably handle it.

So you start writing. Three weeks later, you're 40 pages deep and someone asks: "Did we check how many incumbents are bidding?"

Three. Plus two others you hadn't heard of.

Now you're in a bidding war with a 15% markup, defending against suppliers who've held the contract for a decade. The win probability was never better than 30%. You just burned three weeks of capacity you didn't have to spare.

This is the bid/no-bid problem. Procurement teams chase revenue signals instead of win signals, and it costs them time, money, and morale.

What BidMate does

BidMate takes any opportunity summary, tender notice, or RFP overview and returns a scored recommendation across five factors:

Strategic Fit — does this align with where you're trying to go
Win Probability — can you actually win against the known field
Capacity & Capability — do you have the people and the evidence
Financial Viability — is the margin real after compliance costs
Risk & Complexity — what's the hidden effort

Each factor gets a score out of 100, an impact rating (positive/neutral/negative), and a plain-English rationale. Then it gives you a single verdict: Bid, No-Bid, or a qualified recommendation with the totals.

Here's the output with the NHS Trust example from the tool:

Verdict: Bid          Total Score: 74/100

| Factor              | Impact   | Score | Rationale                                      |
|---------------------|----------|-------|------------------------------------------------|
| Strategic Fit       | Positive | 85    | NHS Managed Services aligns with core IT ops   |
| Win Probability     | Neutral  | 65    | 3 incumbents but strong relevant experience    |
| Capacity & Cap      | Positive | 78    | 8 staff available, 2 similar contracts live    |
| Financial Viability | Positive | 80    | £2M/yr × 5yr, healthy margin at current rates  |
| Risk & Complexity   | Neutral  | 62    | ISO 27001 + Cyber Essentials held, but 3 refs  |

The verdict comes with a reasoning paragraph that actually explains the trade-off — not a green/red blob with no justification.

Why this matters

Most bid/no-bid decisions are made on gut feel. Someone reads the tender, has a meeting, and says "feels like a good fit." Three months later you've spent £40K on a response you had no business writing.

A structured model — scoring every factor with a consistent rubric — surfaces the bad bets before they waste your pipeline. It also surfaces the hidden wins: the opportunities your team dismissed because "competition looked tough" but where your strategic alignment is actually 90%.

The model isn't the final decision. It's a second opinion that never gets tired, never has a conflict of interest, and always scores by the same rules.

The tech (single-file, no install)

Same pattern as the other tools in this suite:

Frontend: Single HTML file. Zero dependencies. Open it in a browser and it works.
Backend: Cloudflare Worker calling Groq's llama-3.3-70b-versatile. Response in 2-4 seconds.
BYOK: If the shared free tier runs out, paste your own Groq API key — same tool, no rate limits.
Self-host: Docker setup on GitHub. docker compose up on your own infra.

No React, no Next.js, no TypeScript toolchain. One HTML file that does one thing.