Federal Grants API Is Free and Public, Yet Platforms Charge Up to $459/Month for It
Several SaaS platforms charge between $179 and $459 per month to deliver US federal grant alerts, but the underlying data comes from a fully public, no-key API hosted by grants.gov. The API supports keyword searches, agency and eligibility filters, and returns detailed opportunity data including award amounts, deadlines, and program officer contact emails. A developer tested the API across 25 opportunities and found that 22 included direct agency contact emails, a field some platforms market as a premium feature. The core product these services sell — new grant alerts filtered to a user profile — can be replicated with basic deduplication logic and a scheduled weekly query. The author published an open Apify actor that replicates the functionality at roughly $0.01 per result row, with a 25-row test run costing less than one tenth of a cent.
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