How Local Bid Alerts Finds Colorado Projects (So You Don’t Have To)

Behind every daily email is a set of scrapers, checks, and filters that keep Local Bid Alerts focused on real opportunities—not random PDFs and policy documents.

This post walks through how the system watches Colorado public portals, what counts as a “real” opportunity, and what happens between a portal posting and a digest landing in your inbox.

The main Colorado sources we watch

Today the service focuses on Colorado public-sector portals, including:

• Statewide solicitation boards and opportunity portals.
• City and county purchasing pages across the Front Range.
• Transit and transportation agencies.
• Portals that use BidNet, OpenGov, or similar e-procurement platforms.

Each source is crawled on a regular schedule. We normalize titles, links, regions, and dates into a single opportunities table so they can be searched, filtered, and de-duplicated.

Filtering out the noise

Government sites are full of “non-opportunities”:

• Policy updates and council agendas.
• Past awards and bid histories.
• Generic vendor registration forms.
• How-to guides and procurement manuals.

Local Bid Alerts applies several layers of filtering to keep the digest clean:

• Title checks to exclude things like “How to Do Business with…” and generic “Vendor Registration” pages.
• Date checks to ignore obviously expired items or archive pages.
• Source-specific rules when a portal mixes bids, news, and documents on the same feed.

Daily email, web dashboard, and history

For most users, the daily email is the main touchpoint. When you open your inbox at 8 a.m., you’ll see:

• A subject line summarizing how many new opportunities were found.
• A list of titles, due dates, sources, and direct links to the posting.
• A short note if something unusual is happening (for example, if a portal is temporarily down).

In the web dashboard, you can browse current and recent opportunities in more detail, save items, and keep track of what you’ve already seen.

Behind the scenes, Local Bid Alerts keeps a history of opportunities so you can look back at what was open last week or last month.

Why registrations still matter

Local Bid Alerts helps you discover opportunities, but you still need valid vendor registrations to submit on them. Many cities require you to be in their system before you can download plans or upload a response.

The goal of the service is to reduce the busywork of watching portals so you can spend more time deciding which projects fit your trade, crew, and capacity.