Legal

Acceptable Use Policy

The short version: don’t scrape us, don’t resell us, don’t use the service to harass agency contacts. We exist because government data should be easy to find — keep it that way.

Last updated April 29, 2026

Overview

This Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) explains how you may and may not use RFPHawk. It supplements our Terms of Service — if there’s ever a conflict between the two, the Terms of Service governs.

Our goal is simple: make government procurement opportunities discoverable for the businesses that want to win them. The rules below exist so the service stays usable for everyone.

What you can do

  • Search, save, and track government RFPs and contracts that match your business interests.
  • Export your saved opportunities to CSV (Pro tier) for use in your own CRM, spreadsheet, or proposal-management tools.
  • Share individual opportunity links with colleagues and partners. Each opportunity has a public-facing landing page anyone can read.
  • Use the AI match score and metadata to prioritize which RFPs your team responds to.
  • Build internal automations against our public API (when available, Pro tier) within the published rate limits.

What you can’t do

You may not, and may not allow anyone else to:

  • Scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract data from RFPHawk by any means other than the features we provide (search, export, public API). The data we surface is public, but the way we surface it isn’t — we pay for the infrastructure that makes it usable.
  • Resell, sublicense, or repackage our data or the service as your own product. That includes creating a competing aggregator, embedding our search results in another property, or selling our match scores as a feed.
  • Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the service.
  • Bypass rate limits, security measures, the free-tier feature limits, or any technical restriction we put in place.
  • Use the service to send spam, harass agency contacts, distribute malware, or attempt to compromise the systems of any government entity whose RFP you discovered through us.
  • Impersonate another person, business, or entity — including using a fake or misleading business name when registering for an account.
  • Interfere with or disrupt the integrity or performance of the service. This includes denial-of-service attempts, deliberate cache-busting, and probes for vulnerabilities outside our security-disclosure program (see /security).
  • Use the service for any illegal purpose, or in violation of any applicable law or regulation — including export-control, sanctions, anti-bribery, or the rules that govern government procurement itself.

How you can use the data

The underlying solicitation data we surface is public-record information published by government agencies (federal contracts via SAM.gov, state procurement portals, etc.). You may rely on what you see in RFPHawk to respond to opportunities you’re eligible to bid on, share specific opportunities with teammates and prime contractors, and incorporate match-score signals into your internal go/no-go decisions.

You may not use the data we collect to build a competing aggregator, populate a standalone database product, or sell access to it as a service. Where we’ve enriched data (deduplication, normalization, AI match scoring), our enrichment is our intellectual property.

See our data sources page for the full list of where our records come from.

Enforcement

If we believe you’ve violated this AUP, we may take any of the following actions, depending on severity and prior history:

  • Send you a written warning and ask you to correct the behavior.
  • Apply tighter rate limits to your account.
  • Suspend specific features (e.g., disable export while leaving search active).
  • Suspend your account pending review.
  • Terminate your account and refuse future signups.
  • Refer the matter to law enforcement, where the conduct involves a suspected crime.

For accounts on a paid plan, suspension does not automatically refund the current billing period. Termination triggers a pro-rated refund at our discretion (see the Terms of Service for details).

Reporting abuse

If you see something on RFPHawk that violates this AUP — spam in a profile, a listing that’s obviously a scam, a user who’s using the service to harass an agency contact — please tell us:

Include as much detail as you can: account email or username, opportunity URL, screenshots, timestamps. We acknowledge every abuse report within two business days and will tell you what action we took (or why we didn’t take action) once we’ve reviewed it.

Contact

Questions about this policy?

We’d rather have a brief, useful AUP than a 40-page document nobody reads. If something here isn’t clear or feels unfair, email us — we’d rather rewrite the rule than have you guess.