If you are trying to work out which federal contracting platform to pay for, here is the honest landscape, including the part that is bad for us to admit.
- GovWin IQ, from Deltek: around $29,000 a year. Built for enterprise capture teams with dedicated staff.
- EZGovOpps: roughly $2,700 a year for one user, $4,700 for three, $6,000 for six.
- GovTribe: around $1,350 a year for federal access, or $99 to $299 a month.
- HigherGov: $500 a year for one user, $2,500 for up to ten, custom above that. A free trial, but no free plan.
- SAM.gov itself: genuinely free, official, and deliberately hard to filter.
So the floor is $500 a year
Every real tool in this market starts at $500 a year and runs to $29,000. The only free option is SAM.gov itself, which is the raw government site, and using it well is a skill rather than a feature.
What none of them do
Every platform on that list assumes you are already a federal contractor. They assume you hold a UEI, that you are certified, that you can recite your NAICS code, and that somebody in your organization does capture management as a job. At $500 a year that assumption is reasonable, because at that price you are buying a research tool, not an on-ramp.
None of them help the owner who has a real business, has never bid on anything federal, and does not yet know that choosing between WOSB and EDWOSB has a 107-industry consequence attached to it. That person is not underserved by these tools. They are not the customer at all. Sold a $500 subscription on day one, they would open it, not recognise a single field, and never log in again.
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