Public money leaves a public trail: reading Dutch and EU tenders without the afternoon of searching
Every Dutch and EU public tender is published by law, and almost nobody reads them. A business that wants to bid, or simply wants to know who is winning contracts in its sector, has to dig through scattered notice portals, inconsistent sector codes, and buyer histories nobody has compiled. The question is not whether the information exists, it already does, it's whether anyone has time to go find it.
What it answers
Four questions that normally cost an afternoon of manual searching each.
Which tenders are open right now in my sector?
The notice explorer lists tenders whose submission deadline has not passed, filtered by CPV sector code, contracting authority, region, contract value band and submission-deadline window. Openness is recalculated against your own clock each time the page loads, so the list does not quietly go stale between data refreshes.
Who has been winning this buyer's contracts?
Award data reaches back to 2016 in the underlying pipeline, though the dashboard's own period filter currently starts at 2024. Within that window a contracting authority's history is visible rather than guessed at: which suppliers keep appearing, how often, and against which CPV codes. Suppliers are ranked by how many awards they won, never by summed contract value, because value is only disclosed on part of the record.
Is this market growing or shrinking?
Publication and spend trends are drawn per month and per sector. Value and description trends start at 2024, where the EU switched to the eForms notice standard, because reporting fields before and after that cliff are not comparable and pretending otherwise would produce a chart that lies.
How much of this is actually reported?
Every money figure carries its own disclosure coverage, shown next to the number itself. Only a minority of open lots and award notices publish a contract value at all, so a total is always labelled as a share of the record and never dressed up as the whole market.
Free to browse, free to keep
The split is deliberate, and it follows what is already public.
The open notice explorer
Open tenders, the columns in the notice table (buyer, sector, deadline, value) and the links back to the original TED publication are free and need no login. That data is already public on TED, so putting a paywall in front of it would be charging for someone else's homework. What we add is that it is joined up, deduplicated and searchable in one place.
The derived intelligence
Buyer award history, repeat-CPV patterns, and recurring winners are the parts that take real pipeline work to produce, and they sit behind a free account. Planned for that tier, not built yet: saving a sector selection, a weekly digest of new notices matching it, and export.
Where the data comes from
Three public layers, joined together.
TED, the EU tender and award feed
Carries both open notices and the record of who won past contracts. See the full tenders and awards product.
CPV, the EU's common procurement vocabulary
Turns "construction" or "IT services" into a filterable category instead of free-text guesswork. See tenders by industry.
NUTS, the EU's standard regional geography
So a province or a corner of the country can be isolated without matching on buyer addresses by hand. Region is one of the filters on the tenders and awards product.
Method, in plain language
Two separate questions, kept separate on purpose.
What's open, and who has been winning
We pull the notice and award feed on a schedule, tag every record with its sector code and region, and separate the two things a business actually wants: what's open right now (recalculated against today's date, so a closed tender never lingers on the list) and who has been winning this buyer's contracts historically. Suppliers are ranked by how often they win, not by summed contract value, because value is only disclosed on part of the record and a value-based ranking would be guessing dressed up as a number.
What this doesn't show
Honest limits, stated plainly.
The 2024 reporting-standard seam
Award data before 2024 uses an older EU reporting standard, and the fields don't line up cleanly with the newer eForms records. We don't stitch the two together and call it one continuous trend, because that produces a chart that quietly lies at the seam.
Most notices don't disclose a value
Any total we show is always labelled as a share of the record, not the whole market, because presenting it as complete would overstate what we actually know.
Ranking is award count, not revenue
A supplier's ranking reflects award count, not revenue or contract size. A supplier winning many small contracts can outrank one winning fewer large ones.
We show who won, not why
Bid quality, pricing strategy, and relationship history are not in the public record, and we don't pretend to infer them. The open-notice explorer reflects what TED has published as of the last refresh, not a live real-time feed of every regional or municipal notice in the country.