Skim vs In-tend
In-tend is the portal you submit through. Skim is how you decide what's worth submitting.
What In-tend is
In-tend is an e-procurement and e-tendering platform built primarily for public sector buyers. Contracting authorities use it to publish tenders, evaluate responses, manage contracts and run e-auctions. It has operated since 2006 and is used by 800+ organisations across 130+ countries.
For suppliers, In-tend runs Sell2UK — a notification service that surfaces opportunities hosted on In-tend portals and gives single-login access to them, so you can express interest and complete your tender response through the platform.
What Skim is
Skim is an AI-native bid platform built for the SME team that has to both find and win the bid. It reads In-tend portals alongside Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, TED and 10,000+ other UK and EU sources, ranks every notice against your win profile, and drafts response text against the buyer’s evaluation criteria.
It does not replace the buyer’s submission portal — when a buyer runs their tender through In-tend, you still submit there. What it replaces is the manual work of finding, qualifying and drafting across every portal, In-tend’s included.
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 If anything here is out of date or wrong, email justin@justskim.ai and we will fix it.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 | In-tend | Skim |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | E-procurement software for buyers, with Sell2UK supplier alerts | AI-native bid platform + expert strategy for suppliers |
| Built for | Public sector buyers running procurement; suppliers submitting to In-tend portals | SME suppliers qualifying and winning bids across all portals |
| Coverage (supplier side) | Opportunities hosted on In-tend portals (Sell2UK) | In-tend portals + Contracts Finder + Find a Tender + TED + 10,000+ UK and EU sources |
| Fit scoring against your win profile | None — alerts by keyword and category | Every notice ranked against your business; bottom ~90% filtered out |
| Bid/no-bid decision support | None | 3-minute decision from the full tender pack |
| Bid response drafting | None — you complete the response in the portal | AI drafts response against published evaluation criteria |
| Renewal forecasting | None — opportunities appear only when published | Renewal windows surfaced months ahead from 20 years of award patterns |
| Expert human layer | Implementation and customer support | Quarterly pipeline review with a dedicated AM (Growth tier+), or dedicated bid support team (Enterprise) |
| Pricing (public) | Not published — price list on request | Free Skim Advisor agent (waitlist), then from £199/mo (Starter) to from £1,500/mo (Enterprise). 15% off annual. |
| Best for | Buyers running compliant procurement; suppliers submitting via In-tend | SME bid teams wanting fit scoring, drafting and expert strategy across every portal |
When In-tend is the right answer
If you are a contracting authority that needs to run compliant procurement end to end — publish, evaluate, award, manage the contract — In-tend is built for exactly that. And as a supplier, when a buyer hosts their tender on In-tend, you will use the In-tend portal to submit. Sell2UK is a reasonable way to catch the opportunities that live specifically on In-tend portals.
When Skim is the right answer
When you are the supplier and the bottleneck is not submitting the response, but deciding which of hundreds of opportunities to chase and getting a winning draft together. Skim is built for:
- Teams who bid across many buyers, not just the ones who happen to use In-tend.
- Bidders who want every notice scored against their accreditations, turnover and past wins before spending a day on it.
- SMEs who lose bids they should have won and want a £3bn+ bid team reviewing the ones that matter.
Can you use both?
Yes — and most In-tend-hosted bids you win will involve both. Skim finds and qualifies the opportunity across every portal and drafts your response; when the buyer runs on In-tend, you submit the finished response through the In-tend portal. Skim is the work before the upload; In-tend is the upload.
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 In-tend.
15-minute call. We run your real pipeline through Skim and you decide if the upgrade is worth it.