Almost everything a monitoring service watches is published free, by the organisation that produced it, on a website anyone can use. If you have the time and the discipline, you can do a serious amount of this yourself and spend nothing.
This is the guide to doing exactly that. It is worth writing because a supplier who understands what the free sources contain makes a better decision about whether to pay anybody, including us.
Public contracts
Find a Tender carries higher-value UK procurement. Contracts Finder carries English opportunities and awards, including a great deal of lower-value work that never appears on Find a Tender. Scotland has Public Contracts Scotland, Wales has Sell2Wales, Northern Ireland has eTendersNI.
Use the saved-search and email options available on the portals relevant to your market. Check their filters and notice coverage so you know what the alerts include.
Two things to do beyond the obvious. Register on the Central Digital Platform through Find a Tender before you need it, because your core business information then goes to every buyer as a share code rather than being retyped. And read the award notices as well as the tender notices, because an award tells you the value, the winner and the term, and the term tells you when it comes up again.
Company events
The Companies House register is free to search and free to read. Any company, its filing history, its officers, its charges, its accounts. You can follow specific companies and receive email when they file.
For a supplier with a customer list, following your own customers is the highest-value use and it costs nothing. A charge, a resignation, late accounts or a change of control on a customer who owes you money is worth knowing on the day it appears.
The Gazette carries insolvency notices, and it is searchable and free. If you do one thing from this article, set up a Gazette search for your largest customers.
Building work
Local planning authorities publish applications and decisions through their planning registers. Check the authority's search and alert options, along with any limits on older documents or online coverage.
If you work in one or two authorities, this is genuinely sufficient. The problem is arithmetic rather than access: a supplier covering fifteen authorities is maintaining fifteen searches on fifteen portals with fifteen different interfaces, and that is where doing it yourself stops being free in any meaningful sense.
Funding
Find a grant covers UK government schemes. Growth hubs publish regional programmes. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own enterprise bodies. Sector associations announce to members first.
Almost all of them have a mailing list, and the mailing lists are better than the search pages, because funding windows open and close faster than most search indexes update.
Sector registers
Sector registers provide another route to research. Food hygiene records and published environmental permits may help identify relevant organisations. The Charity Commission register covers England and Wales, with separate regulators elsewhere in the UK.
A relevant register can be a useful starting list. Check its geographic and reporting coverage before treating it as the whole market.
Read the council contracts register
This one deserves its own section because it is free, it is published by every council in England, and it answers questions that people pay real money for.
Under the Local Government Transparency Code, councils must publish a contracts register every quarter covering every contract, commissioned activity, purchase order and framework agreement with a value over £5,000. Each entry has to carry the supplier's name, a description of what is being bought, the total value or estimated annual spend, and the start, end and review dates. Councils also have to publish a tenders register on the same quarterly cycle and above the same threshold.
The contracts register can help you identify current suppliers and expected end dates. Check whether extensions or newer notices have changed the arrangement before planning your approach.
The same code requires publication of every item of expenditure over £500, quarterly, with the date, the department, the beneficiary, a summary of the purpose and the amount. That is a payment-level view of what a council actually buys, as opposed to what it says it buys, and it catches the substantial volume of spending that never goes near a tender portal.
The quality varies. Some councils publish a clean spreadsheet on a fixed date, others bury a badly exported file three levels into the finance pages, and a few are late. Search the council's own site for contracts register or transparency, and if you cannot find it, ask. It is a publication duty and asking costs an email.
Registers outside procurement
If your customers are not councils, the same principle applies elsewhere and the registers are just as free.
The Charity Commission register carries every registered charity in England and Wales with its income, its trustees and its full accounts, which for larger charities include a narrative on what they intend to spend on next year. The Financial Conduct Authority register lists every authorised firm and every appointed representative, with permissions and dates. The Environment Agency publishes registers of environmental permits, which tell you who operates a regulated site and what they are allowed to do on it.
HM Land Registry price paid data covers recorded sales within its published scope. It has exclusions, so it should not be treated as every property transaction. Food hygiene data likewise needs to be read with the relevant scheme and coverage in mind.
Pick the one register your customers appear on and learn it properly. One register you know well beats five you check occasionally.
What doing it yourself actually costs
A source can be free to access and still take time to use. Include that time when comparing a manual watch with a paid service.
Record the time spent searching and reviewing results. Check whether the routine survives busy periods and whether it covers the sources you need. Connecting related records can take additional work.
For a firm in one or two authorities, in one sector, with time on a Friday afternoon, doing it yourself is a completely reasonable answer and we would rather you did that than paid for something you do not need.
When paying for it starts to make sense
The arithmetic changes at a few specific points, and none of them is about company size.
When your geography crosses more than about three authorities or portals. When you need more than one type of signal, so contracts and planning and company events all matter. When the searching keeps not happening because the people who would do it are the people delivering the work. Or when a single missed opportunity is worth more than a year of monitoring, which for most firms selling to businesses is one job.
Compare the annual monitoring cost with the likely margin from suitable work, rather than the headline value of a job. Then assess whether the service finds relevant opportunities often enough to justify the expense.
How to try the free version properly
If you take one hour this week, spend it like this.
Set a saved search on Contracts Finder and on Find a Tender for your category and region, with email on. Follow your ten largest customers on Companies House. Set a Gazette search for the same ten. Set a planning alert on the one or two authorities where most of your work happens. Sign up to your growth hub's newsletter.
Run the searches for a month and review what arrived. Note any relevant opportunities you found elsewhere. Those results will help you decide whether the free sources are sufficient.