Doing it yourself vs using Quarry
The information is public and free. Finding it, reading it, and judging it is the work, and that work is the only thing we sell.
Everything Quarry shows you comes from public federal sources that you can read for free, today, without us. That is worth saying plainly at the top, because plenty of services in this industry imply they have opportunities you cannot get elsewhere. Nobody does. There is no private pile.
What actually costs you is the reading. Here is the ledger.
The work, side by side
| The work | On your own | With Quarry |
|---|---|---|
| Watching for new notices | A couple of hours a week, every week, forever | Watched continuously, matched to your trades nightly |
| Finding out whether a notice fits you | You read it to find out | A verdict with the reason, before you open it |
| Understanding the vocabulary | A second tab open to a glossary | Plain English in the notice itself |
| Tracking deadlines | A spreadsheet you have to remember to check | Deadlines on every notice, the urgent ones flagged |
| Deciding whether to bid | You | Still you |
| Writing the bid | You | Still you |
| Access to opportunities | Everything is public | The same public everything. We never have more |
The last row is the one to hold us to. If you ever catch us implying otherwise, write to support@quarrybids.com and we will fix the copy.
Who should skip us
Some businesses genuinely do not need a watcher:
- You have one agency, one buyer, and a steady recompete. You need the relationship you already have, not a feed.
- You bid a handful of times a year and know exactly where those notices post. A saved search on SAM.gov may be all the tooling you need, and it is free.
- You want someone to write proposals or make introductions. That is a consultant's job. We render judgment on notices; we do not write bids and we do not know your contracting officer.
Who gets their money's worth
The fit is a business that knows its trade shows up in federal work but keeps losing the hours to looking: reading twenty notices to find one real candidate, missing the short-window postings, discovering a set-aside they held all along only after the deadline. That reading is mechanical, it is daily, and it does not deserve your best hours. It is exactly the part worth handing off.
Explorer is free and there is no card. If the feed does not earn its place in your week, close the account and keep using the how-to pages; they stay free either way.
The short version
We sell time and judgment, never access. If your hours are cheap right now, do it yourself, genuinely, and the how-to pages here show you the whole path. If your hours are the scarcest thing you have, that is what we are for.