ResponseRail
Send a solicitation

What bidding costs.

What it takes to staff your bids yourself, and what the bids you can’t win cost you.

Bids you can’t win.

Before any writing, we check the hard rules: eligibility, Set-asideA contract reserved for certain businesses, such as small, veteran-owned, or 8(a) firms., licenses, ownership, and required forms. Anything that rules you out comes first.

Disqualified at submission

4% to 15%
of vendor submissions on Euna’s public-sector platform, in 2018 and 20145

We check eligibility and the required forms before anyone writes.

Found too late

83%
of federal contractors say they missed opportunities in 2025 because they found them too late6

Matching tells you about eligible notices while there’s still time to bid.

No published study measures the hours a company spends before finding out it can’t bid.
Bids abandoned partway through aren’t counted anywhere.

Ways to staff it.

A hire, a contractor, or a Bid deskA team that finds, writes, and manages a company’s bids. of your own.

Hire a proposal manager

$134K
a year in pay and benefits2

Partly idle below about 45 bids a year.

Contract one

$122 to $168
an hour4

Listed rates for proposal and capture managers.

Build a bid desk

$578K
a year for three people

Plus $156K to set up, and six to twelve months before it runs.

When we’re not a fit.

We’d tell you no early rather than waste your week.

A full proposal team

You already run one.

Short, rare responses

The hours aren’t a burden.

Sensitive work

It involves CUIControlled Unclassified Information: sensitive government data that comes with handling rules., classified, export-controlled, or health data.

Someone to own it all

You want someone else to own the whole proposal.
With us, you decide, sign, and submit.

How we got these numbers

A response takes about 27 hours at small companies and 33 on average, from a 2026 survey of proposal teams. A full pursuit, from screening to a submission-ready packet, takes about 51 by our own count. Proposal work costs about $92 an hour in-house: median pay, plus benefits, tools, and overhead. So a typical response costs about $3,040 of your team’s time. ResponseRail saves about 76% of those hours on average. The bid desk figures come from our own model of a three-person desk. Everything here is an estimate.

  1. 1Loopio, 2026 RFP Trends Report, run with APMP; self-reportedOct 2026
  2. 2BLS, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Project Management SpecialistsOct 2026
  3. 3BLS, Employer Costs for Employee CompensationOct 2026
  4. 4GSA, Contract-Awarded Labor Category (CALC): ceiling rates, not prices paidOct 2026
  5. 5Euna Solutions, “Vendor disqualifications: why they happen,” 2020: platform data, 6,000+ public-sector RFPsOct 2026
  6. 6Deltek, GovCon Clarity 2026: 917 contractors, self-reported (via GovConWire)Oct 2026

Got a solicitation?

Send it over. We’ll tell you whether it fits before any work starts.