Skim vs Find a Tender Service
Find a Tender is where the contracts get published. Skim is where you decide which ones to win.
What Find a Tender Service is
Find a Tender Service (FTS) is the UK government’s official tender notice portal, operated by the Cabinet Office. It publishes high-value (above-threshold) public sector tender opportunities and award notices from contracting authorities across the UK.
It is free to use and authoritative — if a notice exists, FTS is one of the places it lives. It is not, and does not try to be, a workflow tool: there is no fit scoring, no draft response writing, no buyer intelligence, no competitor analytics.
What Skim is
Skim reads Find a Tender Service every hour, alongside Contracts Finder, TED, and 10,000+ other UK and EU procurement portals. It then ranks every notice against your win profile, drafts response text against the buyer’s evaluation criteria, and flags contracts coming up for renewal months before the RFP is published.
Same source data on the input side. The difference is what happens to it once it’s in.
How they compare, attribute by attribute
Stated from the public information each platform publishes about itself. If anything here is out of date or wrong, email justin@justskim.ai and we will fix it.
| Attribute | Find a Tender Service | Skim |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Government tender notice portal (official) | AI-native bid platform that reads FTS for you |
| Cost | Free | Free Skim Advisor (waitlist), then from £199/mo (Starter) |
| Coverage | UK above-threshold public sector notices | FTS + Contracts Finder + TED + 10,000+ portals across UK and EU |
| Fit scoring against your win profile | None — you read every notice yourself | Every notice ranked against your business; bottom 90% filtered out |
| Bid/no-bid decision support | None | 3-minute decision from the full tender pack |
| Renewal forecasting | None — notices appear only when published | Renewal windows surfaced months ahead from 20 years of award patterns |
| Bid response drafting | None | AI drafts response against published evaluation criteria |
| Expert human layer | None | Quarterly pipeline review with a dedicated AM (Growth tier+), or dedicated bid support team (Enterprise) |
| Best for | Bidders verifying a specific notice or auditing official records | Bidders who don't want to read FTS every morning to find the four notices that matter |
Use Find a Tender Service for what it’s for
FTS is the source of truth. Use it to verify a specific notice, to confirm the contracting authority is who you think it is, or to check the official wording before submission. Skim links straight back to the FTS record on every relevant notice, so you can always jump to the source.
What Skim does that reading FTS directly doesn’t
- Hundreds of notices are published per week. Skim shortlists the four worth your time.
- FTS doesn’t tell you whether you can actually win the bid. Skim does — against your accreditations, your turnover, your past wins, and the buyer’s history.
- FTS shows current notices. Skim shows the next twelve months of expected notices from twenty years of award patterns.
- FTS gives you the notice. Skim gives you the bid draft alongside it.
Do you still need Find a Tender Service if you use Skim?
Yes. FTS is the official record and you should treat it as such. What you stop needing is the daily ritual of reading it manually to find the bids that fit you — that’s the work Skim does for you in the background.
The Skim agents that close this gap
Each Skim agent handles a part of the bid lifecycle. These are the ones most relevant to the comparison above.
See whether Skim is the right move from Find a Tender Service.
15-minute call. We run your real pipeline through Skim and you decide if the upgrade is worth it.