One year of GovCon API

GovCon API went live one year ago.

Since then, it has handled more than 10 million API requests, grown to 15.8 million federal procurement records, and gone from almost no traffic in the first few months to around 2 million calls a month today. We have shipped 81 releases along the way.

All figures on this page are as of September 24, 2026.

But first: thank you.

Thank you to everyone who tried the API when it was new, built something with it, reported an issue, asked for a missing capability, used the MCP server, or simply kept coming back.

Using an API means trusting someone else with part of what you are building. We know that, and we are genuinely grateful that people have chosen to trust GovCon API.

Why we built it

The project that became GovCon API started as something else.

We were building a notification service for federal contract opportunities: one saved search, one daily email digest, and none of the noise that makes most contract alerts unreadable.

Building it, we ran into a more basic problem. The hard part was never sending better notifications. It was getting reliable, usable access to the underlying procurement data in the first place.

The data is public. But building on it meant dealing with different systems, formats, limits and identifier schemes before we could start building the thing we actually wanted to make.

So we built the layer underneath first, for ourselves.

It soon became clear that the access layer was more useful than the product it was built for. GovCon API grew out of that work: one interface that other developers and products could build on directly.

That is still the idea today: make federal procurement data easier and cheaper to build on, so more people can build useful things with it.

A lot changed in a year

GovCon API started with federal contract opportunities.

Over the past year, search expanded into full notice text and solicitation documents. Solicitation numbers became procurement trails rather than isolated records. Delta feeds made it possible to keep local indexes synchronized.

Prime contracts, contract vehicles, subawards, entities, exclusions, SBA profiles, wage determinations, bid protests and other datasets joined the same API.

The MCP server grew from six tools to 53. Today the API exposes 65 REST endpoints, and the solicitation-document index alone contains more than 1.16 million files across 273,000 opportunities.

This is no longer the API we launched a year ago.

And it is still being built

The most important thing about the last year is simple:

GovCon API has been actively operated the entire time.

Data is collected every day. New capabilities are shipped regularly. Coverage and freshness are published. Source attribution remains visible. Infrastructure has changed when it needed to, while the public API stayed stable.

That is how we intend to continue running it.

Our commitments for year two

For the next year, we are committing to a few things publicly.

GovCon API will continue operating through at least September 2027.

The core API will remain supported. If a breaking change becomes necessary, it will have a published migration or deprecation path.

The historical corpus will keep growing. Today's federal procurement records will continue becoming tomorrow's historical data rather than being replaced by periodic snapshots.

Coverage and freshness will stay visible. Dataset counts, coverage windows and current-as-of dates will continue to be published.

Source attribution will remain part of the product. Making federal data easier to use should not mean hiding where it came from.

REST and MCP will continue to be supported together over the same underlying data.

We will build plenty of other things during year two, and some of those plans will change. These commitments are different: they are what people building on GovCon API can count on.

Thank you

Ten million requests is a fun number to put on an anniversary page.

What matters most about that number is what it represents: people chose to rely on the service in their own work.

We don't take that trust for granted.

Thank you for using GovCon API, for challenging it, and for trusting us with part of what you are building.

See you at year two.

Published September 25, 2026.