FedFinder MCP server

Federal contracting data as tools your agent can call: open solicitations, 21M award records, 885k registered entities, 1M contracting people, and grants.

Why not just call SAM.gov

You can, and it is free. The reason people stop is that the raw feeds do not answer the question you actually asked.

SAM.gov's active flag does not mean "open for bid". A notice with no response deadline stays active forever, because the retirement sweeps key on the deadline. Measured on FedFinder's production corpus, one row in five that the raw feed calls open is a notice SAM already archived, including one posted in 2008 and archived twelve days later. Grants have the same shape: SAM assistance listings describe standing programmes with no application and no deadline, and they outnumber the real opportunities.

Every tool here filters that out before it answers. That is the product.

Setup

pip install fedfinder-mcp
export FEDFINDER_API_KEY=fedf_live_...

Get a key at https://app.fedfinder.net. Standalone API access is $49/month: 30 requests per minute, 50,000 calls per month.

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fedfinder": {
      "command": "fedfinder-mcp",
      "env": { "FEDFINDER_API_KEY": "fedf_live_..." }
    }
  }
}

Tools

Keys are scoped. A tool whose scope your key lacks returns a message naming the missing scope rather than an opaque 403. Omit scopes when minting a key to grant all read scopes.

Things worth knowing

State filtering is asymmetric on purpose. SAM omits place of performance on about half of all notices, so a bare equality test hides most of the market. A row with no stated performance location falls back to the contracting office's state; a row that states a different location is never rescued by its office, because a DC office buys work performed in Guam and treating those as the same fact would swap a silent miss for a confident error.

Names are stored inverted at the source. "Smith, John", not "John Smith". search_people handles it; if you are joining against another system, do not assume the ordering matches.

Grant close dates are free text. Several formats arrive, some as vague as a bare year. Treat anything you cannot parse as "rolling or unknown" rather than inventing a date, which would close a grant that is still live.

Municipal money is not here. City and county programmes are not tracked by any platform, FedFinder included. If that is what you need, a human has to call the city.

Rate limits

30 requests per minute on the standalone plan, higher on Pro and Intel. A 429 means wait, not retry immediately. api_info reports what your key carries.