Guides

What we learned building this, written down

Every guide here carries at least one number that does not exist anywhere else — measured from our own pipeline, sourced, and dated. Where a figure is uncertain, it says so.

Where Ontario's tenders actually live

All 444 municipalities, checked one by one. 36% are on bids&tenders; 10% publish openly on their own site; 17% could not be found at all.

6 min read · updated 2026-08-04

CanadaBuys vs SEAO vs municipal portals

Three systems, three access realities. What each publishes, what it withholds, and where the gaps are.

7 min read · updated 2026-08-04

The clauses that disqualify compliant bids

Three clause families that reject technically compliant bids, quoted from the documents they appear in, with page numbers.

8 min read · updated 2026-08-04

What a $200K job looks like vs a $2M job

Size variance within a trade is enormous. Categorical lookup scores 34.9% against 34.4% for a constant. The title is where the signal is.

7 min read · updated 2026-08-04

Québec publishes everything. Ontario doesn't.

One province's open data makes analysis possible. The other's gated portals make the same analysis impossible. Here is what each side loses.

7 min read · updated 2026-08-04

How we rank tenders for a firm

The full method, the held-out numbers, and the three biases we know about and have not solved.

9 min read · updated 2026-08-04