Five questions specialty contractors ask first.

Tenderline mines public-record sources — building-permit filings, certificate-of-occupancy records, and state contractor-license databases — alongside a network of lead partners active in specialty trades. A new record moves from “filed” to “tender-ready” once it clears three checks: a real budget, a confirmed scope, and a verifiable owner or general contractor. Because the inputs themselves are public, you can usually cross-check a tender’s provenance back to a permit number or filing ID if a lead ever looks off. Coverage expands state by state as additional contractor-license APIs come online — we add each one as the integration clears a verification period, so a familiar trade showing up “soon” usually means we’re waiting on your state’s database.

Every owner or general contractor attached to a mined tender is checked against the relevant state contractor-license database the moment the record enters the pipeline. If the license doesn’t pull — expired, suspended, or never issued — the project moves to a watchlist rather than your inbox, because the GC likely can’t actually award the work you bid on. We re-run that check on any tender sitting more than fourteen days, so a license that goes stale mid-cycle gets pulled before you respond. The license record (number, status, expiration) ships on every lead card so you can independently verify the same status before signing anything.

You only owe the success fee when a Tenderline match turns into a signed project — there is no per-lead charge on inquiries, and a dead lead costs you nothing. A “dead lead” covers the usual cases: the GC awarded elsewhere, the project was cancelled, or the contact stops responding inside your normal follow-up window. Because the fee is gated on a signed project rather than a delivered lead, you only ever pay on work you’ve actually won — even with a high inbox volume in a slow month. The flip side: jobs you win outside Tenderline from your own separate pipeline still owe the standard fee — it’s the cost of the lead pipeline being funded by wins, not by clicks.

Tenderline is one-to-one: when a tender matches you, you’re the only contractor on Tenderline who sees it. See the full comparison → Per-lead marketplaces sell the same lead to multiple contractors at once, so even a fast reply is already a bidding race against people who paid for the same contact. That asymmetry shows up across win rate, response effort, and the price pressure that comes from racing three replies. The trade-off is access: a marketplace always has more raw volume, but Tenderline’s pre-qualification funnel limits what lands in your inbox to tenders you’re well-placed to win.

Solo and Crew are monthly subscriptions for the platform itself — the matchmaking engine, the license and state coverage, and the trade-specific ingestion pipeline. Compare Solo and Crew → The subscription funds the match-maker that decides which tenders land in your inbox and which rest in a watchlist. The success fee is separate: it’s paid only when a Tenderline-matched tender turns into a project you sign, and it’s a percentage of that one bid, not of every job across your pipeline. Solo targets single-trade subcontractors with a smaller feed; Crew adds multi-trade crew capacity planning and a wider lead pipeline if you run subs.