[MoOmer]

While that may be true if contractors/competitors for contracts were generally unaware of the contract until posting, that’s usually not the reality. A lot of government contracting advice from experienced contractors is that if you’re discovering it via a public source (i.e. the website) you’re too late.

[hdivider]

This I am afraid is not true either, though. I know many dual-use companies who discovered an RFP (not just on SAM), late -- i.e. with a proposal deathmarch -- and got through.

[MoOmer]

My understanding is that those scenarios are the exception, and finding obscure contracts that have gone undiscovered isn’t really an untapped fount of free, missed, opportunity.

That said, aggregators like bonfire etc. can get you pretty far if that’s your strategy!

[chatmasta]

How can you be "too late?" Isn't the point of RFP postings that they're the first step in a process of soliciting proposals (bids) for the requested project? They're certainly not supposed to be granted on any kind of first-come, first-served basis... combatting that sort of corrupt insider dealing is the whole reason there are legal requirements to post them in the first place. So while I don't doubt the premise of your cynical truism that "if you're discovering it via a public source you're too late," I hope that this is a separate issue from the RFP process itself, because any project where that's the case must be a project where the RFP was meaningless in the first place. And that behavior is also explicitly illegal, even if it's unfortunately prevalent and infrequently prosecuted.