Questions, answered plainly

SAM.gov shows you the listing. InstantSam downloads up to fifteen attachments on that listing, the PDFs and Word documents holding the Statement of Work, the submission instructions and the evaluation criteria, reads them, and gives you a structured briefing: scope, mandatory requirements, how bids are scored, risks, and a bid or no-bid read. On a long solicitation, or one with many attachments, it reads only part of the text, so check anything the briefing does not mention against the documents themselves.

The same documents read a different way. It pulls out up to forty things the solicitation says you must submit or include for your offer to be accepted, and turns them into a list you can tick off. Each item carries the exact sentence it came from, so you can check it yourself, and anything that would make your offer non-responsive is marked. It is part of the notice’s document review: building it after the review spends nothing more, and building it first makes the review free.

A straight answer at the top of every solicitation: strong match, worth a look, or probably not. It comes from your company profile, the NAICS codes you work in and the set-aside statuses you hold, compared with what the notice asks for, plus how many days are left. On a grant it reads instead who may apply, from the applicant list Grants.gov publishes. The reasons are listed under the answer, so if it says probably not you can see which line decided it. It does not read the attachments, so it cannot judge whether you can do the work. It tells you whether you are allowed to bid and whether there is time.

A list of contracts in your NAICS codes, in the states you work in, that end between six and eighteen months from now. When a contract ends the work usually does not, so it gets bid again, and the incumbent is a matter of public record long before anything appears on SAM.gov. Large firms have capture teams who track exactly this. The radar is that list without the capture team. Six months is the near edge because inside that the solicitation has usually already posted, so it belongs in Search where you can bid on it. It is not a prediction: work gets extended, canceled, consolidated or folded onto a contract vehicle. What is certain is the end date and who holds it.

Yes. Open a saved opportunity and upload the file. Upload it again after a revision and both are kept, numbered, with the newest on top and the older ones a tap away. Files are private to your team and each can be up to 25 MB. Deleting a version removes it for everyone on the team.

Your own list of companies you might bid with. When you open a solicitation, InstantSam shows who has been winning that kind of work from the public award record, and any of them can be saved as a partner in one tap. You can also add a company by hand. Each one carries a note only your team can see, and you can attach them to a bid as prime, sub or still talking. Nobody on the list is contacted, nobody is matched with you, and the app never says a company is looking for partners, because the data cannot support that claim. It is a record of who you know and who has already proved they can do the work.

Federal contract opportunities, award notices and contractor registrations come from SAM.gov, and award and spending history from USASpending.gov. Grants come from Grants.gov, defense SBIR and STTR topics from DSIP, and DLA requests for quotation from the DIBBS daily index. State and local bids come from eight official portals: Texas, New York City, Florida, North Carolina, Los Angeles, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois. Forecasts come from the federal Forecast of Contracting Opportunities and the City of Boston buying plan, and the labor rates behind price to win from GSA CALC+. Each is an official government source. SAM.gov and Grants.gov are read every hour, and the state and local portals, SBIR topics, DIBBS and the forecasts once a day.

It is grounded in the documents it read, it does not answer from general knowledge, and if something is not in those documents it is instructed to say so rather than guess. That said, it is a research assistant, not an authority. Always read the source solicitation before you submit a bid. See our terms for the formal version of that.

If it is a SAM.gov or DIBBS notice, there is nothing to read, and InstantSam tells you so plainly instead of inventing an analysis. It does not cost you a review either. The same is true when the attachments turn out to be scanned images with no text in them. A grant, an SBIR or STTR topic or a state or local bid without attachments is read from its own description when there is enough of it, and that uses a review like any other.

Your first 3 AI document reviews, so you can see what a document review actually gives you before deciding anything. Then browsing contract opportunities from SAM.gov, grants from Grants.gov, state and local bids from eight portals, defense SBIR and STTR topics and DLA DIBBS requests for quotation. Advanced search and filters, Home, with what needs a decision today, creating pursuits and tracking them by stage, who won a pursuit once it is awarded and what they were paid, and the deadline calendar. Free forever, no card required.

No. You get 3 once and they do not come back. They exist so you can see the output before paying for it, not as a small monthly allowance. Essential is 5 a month and Professional 15, each review with its compliance checklist, and those do reset on the 1st. A review is only spent when there was something to read, so a SAM.gov or DIBBS notice with no attachments costs you nothing.

The reading, for one person. AI Document Review, 5 a month, each with its compliance checklist; a Sources Sought draft counts as one. The proposal outline, drafting guides with a Word skeleton, and the submission package. The AI Bid Assistant and questions for the contracting officer, 25 uses a month. Plain English search, 300 a month. A fit assessment on every solicitation. Smart alerts by email and push, the matches they find, amendment watch and the daily digest. Certification renewal reminders. Price to win from GSA ceiling rates. A calendar feed, spreadsheet exports, reports and proposal files with versions. $29.99 per month, or $24.99 a month billed yearly, and a first monthly subscription's first two months are $19.99 each. No proposal drafts, and none of the research below.

Everything in Essential, with 15 document reviews a month, each with its compliance checklist, the assistant (25 uses a month) and plain English search (1,000 a month), plus the research a capture team would do: award search, what comparable work has paid, how crowded the field is and who keeps winning it, win likelihood with its reasons, the Recompete Radar, the market view, contract vehicles, forecasts, Officer Search, Business Search and company profiles. AI proposal drafts, 5 a month, and a teaming partner list. $69.99 per month, or $59.99a month billed yearly, and a first monthly subscription's first two months are $49.99 each. Professional was called Pro until 22 October 2026: the same plan, the same price. Full breakdown on the pricing page.

Yes, and where you do it depends on where you bought it. If you subscribed on the website, cancel from your account page. If you subscribed inside the iPhone app, Apple handles it, so cancel from your Apple subscription settings. Either way you keep your plan through the period you already paid for, then drop back to Free. Nothing is deleted: your pursuits, results and alerts stay where they are, but alerts stop sending and the paid features are locked until you subscribe again.

A solicitation counts once: its document review and its compliance checklist share one spend, whichever is built first, and a Sources Sought draft counts once too, because it reads the notice: 5 a month on Essential, 15 on Professional and 40 on Premier, pooled across the team. Reading a bigger notice whole, up to 30 attachments and 1,000,000 characters, uses 2 or 3, and you agree to the number before it starts. The counter resets on the 1st of each month. The AI Bid Assistant is 25 uses a month on Essential, 25 on Professional and 63 on Premier, shared by the team, and plain English search is 300, 1,000 and 2,500; a question, a notice summary, a set of questions for the contracting officer and a proposal outline each use one assistant use. The limits are also in the billing terms, and your account page shows the count when it gets close. Proposal drafts have their own allowance, 5 a month on Professional, and 13 pooled on Premier. Every other feature keeps working when one runs out. If you consistently need more, tell us what you are working on.

Payments made on the website run through Stripe, and card details go to Stripe directly rather than to our servers. Purchases made inside the iPhone app are handled by Apple, and we never see the card at all.

Both. InstantSam is on the App Store and on Google Play. Your account is the same on the website and on your phone: the same pursuits, the same reviews, the same team. Some features reach the website before the phone app, so the newest may not be in the app yet. Create your account on either one and sign in on the other whenever you want it. If you have turned on two-factor authentication, use the website until your phone app has the update that asks for your authenticator code. A solicitation is easier to read at a desk, and the app is there for what arrives during the day.

On iPhone you upgrade inside the app and Apple handles the payment; the app sells Professional, monthly. The Android app does not sell plans. Upgrade here on the website, from your account page, where the payment runs through Stripe, then sign in on your phone with the same account and your plan is already there. Both give you exactly the same features.

No. Every paid plan includes both email and push alerts, with no per-alert charge.

Yes. Pursuits and alerts are shared across your team, and each person can switch to My work, so everyone sees the same bids and the same deadlines. Premier gives you 5 seats, team management, and a compliance checklist your team can assign items on, so it is visible who is doing what before a submission. It also adds integrations: a read-only API key and webhooks that post to your own systems.

No. InstantSam is an independent product with no affiliation with, or endorsement from, SAM.gov, the General Services Administration, or any federal, state or local government agency. We use their public data.

InstantSam was built by a statistician and data quality specialist with postgraduate training in generative AI from UT Austin. The AI does the reading, but the checks around it were designed by someone whose job was catching data errors. Every item in a compliance checklist carries the exact sentence of the solicitation it came from, so what it says can be checked against the source.

We use it to run the product and to send you occasional news and offers about InstantSam, which one click stops. We do not sell it. You can email yourself a copy of your data from inside the app, under More, or download it from your account page on the website, and delete your question history from either place. The privacy policy spells out exactly what is collected and who processes it.