What this does, and what stays yours

Not behind a confirmation and not behind a setting. BidCaliper assembles a package; you sign it and you send it. The decision to bid, and everything on the form when it goes in, is yours.

Ambiguity produces REVIEW, never CLEAR. Where a figure is missing it says so instead of inventing one, and every finding quotes the sentence it came from.

Two open sources are read under licences that permit it — CanadaBuys and SEAO. MERX, BC Bid and Alberta Purchasing Connection are not, and what is and is not reachable is set out at /sources with the date each was checked. Notices change after publication; buyers issue addenda late.

Where two sources disagree about a date, BidCaliper says they disagree and tells you to check rather than picking one silently. Where it flags a conflict, check the portal.

BidCaliper records that it read an addendum and, separately, that you marked it acknowledged on your bid form. Those are two different facts about two different actors, and a bid that misses an acknowledgement is non-compliant regardless of what we read.

Documents and the findings taken from them are scoped to your company and are never pooled, shared between customers, or used to improve anything anybody else sees. A standing check plants a decoy across the boundary and fails if it ever crosses.

Some portals licence their content to their own subscribers and forbid redistribution. Bringing a notice in under your own subscription is you exercising your entitlement. You need to actually hold it — BidCaliper cannot check that for you, and does not redistribute what you bring.

The cost twin is built from your utilization, overhead and wages. Where you leave one blank it uses a stated industry benchmark and labels it as one. It is an estimate with its error published, not a quotation.

Price bands were built, measured and thrown away — there is not enough public data to produce one honestly. 'Your win rate' is a stated base rate over bids you recorded, never a forecast about the tender in front of you.

Incumbency comes from published award notices across the federal and Québec sources, counted per solicitation rather than per award line. How many firms typically bid is a separate figure and it is not available everywhere: Québec publishes the number of bidders on an award and the federal source does not, so that metric shows a dash on a federal buyer. Where there is too little history to say anything useful, you get a dash and the reason rather than a number.

A login is a person, because the decision record has to name who decided. A standard account is one named user on every plan. More than one person on a company is available only where we have explicitly enabled a team entitlement for that account, and each additional user has to be individually authorised and invited. A matching company email domain does not by itself create or grant access to an account. Accounts are not to be shared.

A subscription runs month to month and renews automatically at the end of each monthly period until it is cancelled.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the monthly period you have already paid for, and you keep full access until then. There is nothing to negotiate and no notice period.

Cancelling partway through a paid month does not produce a refund or a credit for the unused days — you keep the access instead. This is the trade: no minimum term, no part-month refunds.

Setting up an account costs nothing and stays free: every tender screened against your shop, every verdict with the reasoning behind it, the gate calendar and the cost twin. What a subscription adds is the assembled bid package on every tender — a free account gets one. Nothing expires, and there is no clock to beat.

Subscriptions can be started with a card, and the terms above apply from your first invoice. Payments are processed by Stripe; BidCaliper never sees or stores your card details. A free account remains free and is not a trial — you are only charged if you choose a plan.

BidCaliper helps you find, screen, price and prepare. It does not promise that an opportunity will be available, that you will be eligible for it, that a bid will succeed, that a job will be profitable, or that the service will be available without interruption.

Much of what BidCaliper produces is arithmetic over information you supply — your overhead, your wages, your utilization, your quantities. Where an input is missing it uses a stated benchmark and labels it as one. Inaccurate or incomplete inputs produce inaccurate outputs, confidently.

Tender information originates in part with government and other third-party procurement sources. It can be changed, corrected, delayed, withdrawn or incomplete at source, and BidCaliper cannot make it otherwise. What we read, and what we are not permitted to read, is set out at /sources with the date each was checked.

Before you submit, check the buyer's own materials — the solicitation, the drawings, the specifications, the addenda and the submission requirements. Where BidCaliper says something is uncertain, or that two sources disagree, that is an instruction to go and look rather than a problem we have solved for you.

BidCaliper does not provide legal, engineering, accounting, surety, insurance or procurement-authority advice, and its calculations are software output rather than a professional estimating service. Where a question needs one of those, it needs one of those.

To the extent the law allows it to be limited, BidCaliper's total liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the service in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees you actually paid for the service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. Some liability cannot be limited or excluded by agreement — nothing here attempts to limit that, and where the law says a limitation does not apply, it does not apply.

To the extent the law allows, BidCaliper is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, including lost profits, lost opportunities, lost contracts or the cost of preparing a bid. Again, only so far as the law allows.

You are responsible for claims arising from material you upload that you did not hold the rights to, from using the service unlawfully, from a submission of yours that is fraudulent or misleading, and from your infringement of somebody else's rights. That is the whole of it — it is deliberately narrow and does not make you responsible for our mistakes.

An account is one named person, because the decision record has to name who decided. That is true on every plan. Access for more than one person is available only where we have explicitly enabled a team entitlement on your account, and each additional user must be individually authorised and invited — sharing an email domain with somebody does not by itself give them access. Keep your password to yourself; if you think somebody else has it, change it, which signs out every other browser.

Anything you hold the rights to. Notices from a subscription portal are you exercising your own entitlement — we do not redistribute them, and they are never shown to another customer.

Use it for your own bidding, freely. It is your decision record, your priced schedule and your bid package. What it is not is a feed to resell: the underlying public data is published under licences that permit us to read it, not licences that make it ours to sell on.

The service is kept running and is not guaranteed to be uninterrupted. Where a data source we depend on goes down or stale, the product says so on your dashboard rather than quietly showing you a shorter list.

If they change materially, the change is dated at the top of this page and account holders are told by email.