Tender alerts for UK facilities, cleaning & trades

Who this sector page is for

Directors and owners of UK limited companies in facilities management, commercial cleaning, and building trades who already know Contracts Finder exists — and still lose Monday mornings to keyword noise, wrong geography, and lots that were never going to fit.

Typical readers: multi-site cleaning contractors, soft FM and caretaker services, reactive and planned maintenance trades, grounds and external works, and specialist trades that bid local-authority, education, housing and NHS estates work. Sole traders may sign up; we do not cold-email them.

Pure window cleaning (CPV 90911300) is a separate trade on the portals — see the window cleaning sector page for pitfalls that do not belong on a general FM brief.

If your pipeline is mostly private commercial, or you only chase multi-million frameworks, this digest is the wrong product. The band we skew toward is the one facilities and trades directors usually bid: roughly £10k–£250k.

The £10k–£250k band (and why it matters)

Below about £10k, many public bodies buy without a formal notice you will see in time. Above a few hundred thousand, the process, insurance, turnover gates and bid cost change shape — and a short weekly list is less useful than a dedicated bid team.

In the middle sits the work BidFit is built around: school and college cleaning lots, housing-association reactive repairs, leisure-centre FM packages, council depot trades, NHS estates smaller packages, and similar notices that land on Contracts Finder every week and sometimes on Find a Tender when the value or regime pushes them there.

We do not promise every notice in that band will appear in your inbox. We match from the public portals to the trade and region profile you set — then cap the free plan at up to three fits a week so the email stays readable.

Hard no’s are part of the product

Keyword alerts treat “cleaning” as one bucket. Your firm does not. BidFit matching starts from what you actually do and where you can cover — then from what you will not take.

Hard no’s we expect facilities, cleaning and trades directors to name include:

• Nights or 24/7 cover you cannot staff
• TUPE you will not absorb on this contract size
• Live hospitals, secure estates, or DBS-heavy sites outside your clearance
• Working at height or specialist plant you do not hold
• Frameworks you are not on — so a “call-off only” notice is a waste of a Monday
• Travel radius beyond depots you can actually serve

Those lines are not decoration. They are how we keep window cleaning out of a building-cleaning flood, and how we stop a Kent firm drowning in Cumbria lots. The fuller product write-up is on the free tender digest page; signup is at /digest/.

Weekly free vs daily £19/month

Free weekly: one email a week, up to three matches, no card. Enough when you already scan the portals and only want a second pair of eyes on fit.

Daily (£19/month): the same matching, one email per working day. For firms that miss notices between Mondays, or that bid often enough that a weekly cap of three is too thin. Cancel by email before the next bill — there is no retainer theatre and the old Watch product is closed.

Either plan can link a match through to an optional £9.99 public-notice memo if you want a sourced Go / No-go PDF on one URL. That memo is a decision document, not a written bid. For format only — not a digest sample — see the Bedford public-notice memo.

What BidFit is not (for this sector)

• Not bid writing. We do not draft method statements, complete selection questionnaires, or register you on buyer portals. If the verdict on a notice is Go, you still need your own bid — in-house or hired.
• Not a tender search engine. There is no dashboard of every UK notice, no “AI tender search”, and no promise that we replace Contracts Finder or Find a Tender. Keep the official saved searches; use BidFit when you want one short matched list.
• Not a named-notice rewrite service sold as alerts. This page is about the digest product for facilities, cleaning and trades. Pasting a URL for a memo is a separate SKU when you already have a notice in hand.

How signup works

1. Start at /digest/ with a magic link. No password to invent on the free plan.
2. Set trade, region and hard no’s. Window cleaning is not building cleaning; LV boards are not emergency lighting — say what you actually do.
3. Read the weekly email. Upgrade to daily (£19/month) when Monday is not enough. Full prices on Prices.