Federal contracting & grant intelligence
If you are registered in SAM.gov you already qualify for all three — and almost nobody watches more than one. SubSignal watches the contracts a prime is legally obliged to subcontract, the work about to be bought before the solicitation exists, and the grants that are actually open to companies rather than universities.
New here? Start with
what SubSignal actually does →
Or open the free dashboard → your three signals
filtered to your codes, plus a SAM.gov renewal countdown. No account, nothing leaves your
browser.
When a large company wins a big federal contract, it is legally required to subcontract part of the work to small businesses. By the time the award is common knowledge, the subcontracting plan is already written. Source: USASpending.gov.
Every federal contract carries the contracting officer's own determination in a field called
subcontracting_plan. Codes C, D, F,
G and H mean a small-business subcontracting plan is required or
already in place.
So we don't estimate which primes might sub work out. We read the flag. About a third of large new awards carry one. The other two thirds are the noise every "big contract alerts" list still sends you.
Loading awards…
A sources sought notice means the government has a need and has not yet written the solicitation. It is the only stage where a capability statement can still change what the contract asks for — and if enough small businesses answer, the whole thing can be set aside for small business. Source: sam.gov.
Loading notices…
A federal grant applicant and a federal contractor are the same registered entity, with the same UEI. Most grants are open only to states, tribes and universities, which is why grants.gov feels useless — these are filtered to the ones that name small businesses or are unrestricted. Source: grants.gov.
Loading grants…
The filtering is the product, and it applies to all three signals. Two thirds of large awards carry no subcontracting obligation. Notices that have already closed are dropped. Around two thirds of federal grants are open only to states, tribes and universities, never to a company. Here is the award funnel from the most recent scan:
All three boards are free and always will be. You pay only when you want the ones in your codes pushed to you the day they land, instead of checking three pages.
Setup is done by email right now, on purpose. Tell me your codes, I confirm
what's already in them before you pay a cent. If nothing in your codes has carried a plan lately,
I'll tell you that instead of taking your money.
There's also a Team plan at $399/mo for up to five people across
separate divisions, and annual billing is twelve months for the price of ten.
Full pricing and the comparison against GovWin and Instrumentl →
Tell us what you do and where. When a prime wins work in your codes, when an agency starts looking for someone who does what you do, or when a grant opens that you are eligible for, you hear about it — with the reference number, the agency, and who to approach.
Your address is used only to send you these alerts. Never sold or shared. Unsubscribe in one click. See the privacy policy.
Separately, and free forever: get warned before your SAM.gov registration expires — 90, 60, 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 days out. A lapsed registration makes you ineligible for award, and it expires exactly 365 days after activation, not on a date you'd remember.