For sub-$10M federal contractors — civilian agencies, not defense primes
Every sentence cited.
Every clause traced.
RFPTrace drafts federal proposals grounded in your own past performance — with a visible citation on every line, so a contracting officer never mistakes your work for generic AI.
- Every sentence cited to your source
- Verified U.S. data residency
- Self-serve under $1,000/mo
You don't have a capture team. You have nights and weekends.
A single solicitation eats 40 to 60 hours — re-reading Section L and M, hand-building a compliance tracker in Excel, reformatting the same past performance you submitted last month. You win about one bid in four, so most of that work walks out the door. And the AI tools that promise relief produce exactly the generic copy contracting officers are trained to flag.
- 40–60 hours burned per solicitation
- ~1 in 4 win rate — most of the effort is sunk
- Excel Section L/M tracked by hand
- Flagged COs flag generic AI-written proposals
How it works
From solicitation PDF to submission-ready Word doc — in five steps
RFPTrace runs the same five steps every time, in order, so nothing in the solicitation gets missed and every drafted sentence traces back to your own documents.
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Upload the solicitation
Drop in a solicitation PDF or Word file (up to 100MB), or paste a SAM.gov opportunity URL. RFPTrace parses it into clean, structured text.
Solicitation parsed -
Auto-build the compliance matrix
Claude reads the full solicitation and extracts every requirement into a structured Section L/M matrix — section reference, requirement text, response section, page limit, and applicable FAR clauses on each row.
Section L/M mapped -
Load your past performance
Upload your contract narratives, CPARS, capability statements, and key-personnel resumes. RFPTrace vectorizes them into a searchable library and pulls the most relevant examples for each requirement.
Library indexed -
Draft with traced citations
RFPTrace drafts a first-pass response for every matrix row, grounded in your own library. Every sentence is anchored to its source document with a verifiable citation, and applicable FAR clauses are cited explicitly.
Cited first draft -
Clear the compliance gate
An automated pass checks for missing responses, page-limit violations, unaddressed FAR clauses, and contradictions. Blocking issues must clear before Export unlocks — then you get a formatted Word doc ready for human review and submission.
Export-ready Word doc
Save 10+ hours per proposal.
Trust & traceability
Every sentence traces back to your own documents. So your contracting officer can verify it.
COs flag generic AI-written proposals because they read like they came from nowhere — no source, no proof, no accountability. RFPTrace drafts differently: every sentence is anchored to a specific document in your past-performance library, with a visible, clickable citation showing exactly where the claim came from. Nothing is invented, nothing is unverifiable — when a reviewer asks "where does this number come from," the answer is already on the page.
Powered by Anthropic Citations. FAR clauses are cited explicitly by number — never paraphrased away.
"Our team sustained a 99.2% on-time delivery rate across 1,400+ medical-logistics shipments during the 2022–2023 base period, with zero CPARS-cited deficiencies."
VA-2023-Logistics-CPARS.pdf, p.4
"Key personnel hold active Public Trust clearances and averaged 11 years of federal supply-chain experience at contract start."
KeyPersonnel-Resumes-Bundle.docx, p.2
Section L/M compliance matrix
Your Section L/M compliance matrix, built in minutes — not a weekend in Excel.
RFPTrace reads the full solicitation and extracts every instruction and evaluation factor into a structured matrix — section reference, requirement text, response location, page limit, and applicable FAR clauses, row by row. What used to take hours of hand-building trackers and re-reading Sections L and M happens in minutes, with nothing dropped.
| Section Ref | Requirement | Response § | Page Limit | FAR Clause |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| L.3.1 | Submit Technical Approach describing methodology for task areas 1–3 | Volume I, § 2.1 | 10 pages | 52.212-1 |
| L.3.2 | Provide three relevant past-performance references within the last 5 years | Volume II, § 1.0 | 5 pages | 52.212-1 |
| L.4.2 | Complete representations and certifications, including covered-telecom prohibition | Volume III, § 3.4 | No limit | 52.204-24 |
| M.2 | Technical approach evaluated for feasibility, completeness, and risk | (Evaluation factor) | — | 52.215-1 |
Automated compliance gate
Nothing exports until it's compliant. The gate doesn't open early.
Before you can generate a final Word document, RFPTrace runs an automated compliance pass against the matrix it built from the solicitation. Blocking issues must clear before Export activates — so a missed requirement or a page-limit overrun is caught here, at your desk, instead of by the contracting officer.
Export stays locked until every blocking issue is resolved. You ship a proposal that's already passed its own review.
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Missing responses — every Section L requirement is mapped to drafted content; unanswered rows block export.
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Page-limit violations — each volume is measured against its stated limit; overruns are flagged before they disqualify you.
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Unaddressed FAR clauses — required clauses from the matrix (e.g., 52.204-24, 52.212-1) must be explicitly addressed.
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Semantic contradictions — conflicting claims across sections (dates, dollar figures, personnel, performance metrics) are surfaced for resolution.
Pricing
Priced for a 2-person firm, not a prime.
Self-serve, month-to-month — less than a junior employee, and defensible on a sub-$1M task order.
Starter
$99/mo ASSUMPTION
per month, billed monthly
Solo owner-operator running a couple of bids a month.
- 2 active solicitations per month
- Section L/M compliance matrix, auto-built in minutes
- First-pass drafts grounded in your own past-performance docs
- Every sentence traced to its source with a verifiable citation
- Explicit FAR clause references on every requirement
Pro
$299/mo ASSUMPTION
per month, billed monthly
Growing firm running several RFPs a month and managing a real past-performance library.
- Everything in Starter, with a higher solicitation volume
- Full past-performance library — CPARS, contract narratives, capability statements, key-personnel resumes
- Semantic retrieval surfaces your most relevant past performance per requirement
- Automated compliance gate before export — flags missing responses, page-limit violations, unaddressed FAR clauses, and contradictions
- Word export, formatted and ready for human review
Team
$699/mo ASSUMPTION
per month, billed monthly
Firms of up to 10 people sharing one library and one bid pipeline.
- Everything in Pro
- Up to 10 seats
- Shared past-performance library across the team
- Priority support
- Centralized citation and compliance history across all bids
All plans under $1,000/mo. Cancel anytime. Verified U.S. data residency. [ASSUMPTION] Pricing shown is preliminary and will be confirmed at launch.
Compare
Why RFPTrace wins for sub-$10M civilian contractors
The enterprise GovCon tools weren't built for you — they were built for primes with capture teams and five-figure budgets. Here's how RFPTrace compares on what actually matters to a sub-$10M firm.
| Capability | RFPTrace | GovDash | Loopio | DeepRFP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for sub-$10M civilian firms | Purpose-built for solo & 2–10 person civilian contractors | Built for primes with capture teams | Needs a content-ops team | SMB-priced, but not US-civilian-focused |
| Sentence-level source citations | Every drafted sentence traced to your own source doc (Anthropic Citations) | No paragraph-level traceability | Content reuse, not sentence-level provenance | No documented sentence-level citations |
| Section L/M matrix automation | Auto-built in minutes from the solicitation | Compliance matrix included | Manual library tagging, not L/M-native | Requirement extraction, unverified on FAR Part 15 |
| FAR Part 15 structural depth | Purpose-built for federal solicitation structure | Federal-native | General-purpose RFP tool | Unverified extraction accuracy on US FAR Part 15 |
| Verified U.S. data residency | Verified US data residency | US-based | Enterprise data controls, not SMB-documented | Spanish-based, no documented US residency |
| Self-serve under $1,000/mo | Starter $99 / Pro $299 / Team $699 ASSUMPTION | ~$12,000/mo | $20,000+/yr | $75/user/mo (but Spanish, no US residency) |
| Amendment delta-tracking | On the roadmap — uncontested territory | Not offered | Not offered | Not offered |
Competitor capabilities and pricing are based on publicly available information as of mid-2026 and may change; verify current details directly with each vendor.
FAQ
Straight answers for federal contractors who've been burned by generic tools.
Is RFPTrace only for civilian agencies? What about CUI and CMMC?
RFPTrace is purpose-built for sub-$10M contractors bidding civilian agencies — HHS, VA, GSA, DoE, DoT, Treasury, and DoD-civilian work. Through v1 we support firms that handle Federal Contract Information (FCI) only, not Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), which keeps you outside the CMMC Level 2 burden. That matters now: CMMC 2.0 Phase 2 makes Level 2 mandatory for many defense contracts starting November 10, 2026 — we deliberately stay on the civilian, FCI-only side of that line so you carry none of that compliance weight to use us.
Where is my data stored?
On verified U.S. infrastructure, full stop. Your solicitations, past-performance library, and drafts stay in U.S. data residency — not offshore, not in an unnamed region. We document where your data lives because, for federal work, "trust us" isn't an answer.
How do I know the AI won't write generic content a contracting officer will flag?
Because RFPTrace doesn't write from a generic model's imagination — it drafts from your documents. Every sentence it produces is anchored to a source in your own past-performance library with a visible, verifiable citation (built on Anthropic's Citations), and applicable FAR clauses are cited explicitly. You can click any sentence and see exactly which of your documents it came from, so when a CO scrutinizes the proposal, the provenance is right there. That traceability is the whole point — it's the antidote to the generic-AI tell that gets proposals flagged.
What file types and sizes can I upload?
Upload your solicitation as a PDF or Word document, up to 100MB — large enough for full FAR Part 15 packages with attachments. Or skip the download entirely and paste a SAM.gov opportunity URL; we'll pull and parse it into structured text. Your past-performance docs — contract narratives, CPARS, capability statements, key-personnel resumes — load the same way into your library.
Does it really understand FAR Part 15 solicitation structure?
Yes — it's built for it, not adapted to it. RFPTrace extracts every requirement from your solicitation into a structured Section L/M compliance matrix, mapping each requirement to its section reference, response section, page limit, and applicable FAR clauses. It's tuned for how federal negotiated procurements are actually organized, which is exactly where general-purpose RFP tools fall down.
How much time can it actually save me?
The target is 10+ hours per proposal — that's our explicit threshold, not a marketing ceiling. If your team is burning 40–60 hours per solicitation re-reading sections, hand-building Section L/M trackers in Excel, and reformatting past performance, the compliance matrix alone collapses hours of that into minutes. We'd rather under-promise here than have you do the math and feel cheated.
What's on the roadmap?
The next major build is automated amendment delta-tracking: when a contracting officer issues a mid-proposal amendment, RFPTrace flags exactly what changed and which matrix rows and drafted sections are affected — so you're not re-reading the entire solicitation to find three edits. It's a problem every contractor hits and no tool in this space has solved well. [ASSUMPTION] Specific release timing will be confirmed by the founder.
Every sentence cited. Every clause traced.
Join the waitlist and be first in line when RFPTrace opens to sub-$10M civilian contractors.
Verified U.S. data residency · Self-serve under $1,000/mo · No spam.