[ PRODUCT / MONITORING ]

Eight defence procurement sources, one feed you can trust

Defense Explorer ingests EU, NATO and national procurement sources every day, collapses duplicates, classifies each notice for defence relevance with the reason shown, and tells you when a source is not working instead of letting a quiet week look normal.

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UPDATED 15 SEP 2026

In one paragraph

[ SUMMARY ]

A narrow, defence-filtered feed with provenance, rather than the largest possible number of portals. Every notice keeps its original language and source link, and every source states what it covers.

01TED, NATO/NSPA, EU Funding & Tenders, TenderNed, UK Find a Tender, UK Contracts Finder, Spain’s PLACSP and France’s BOAMP.
02National platforms filtered to defence-relevant notices; the same notice on several portals collapsed into one record.
03Relevance classes of military, dual-use, civil security or unrelated, with every matching cue listed as the reason.
04Clearance recorded as stated, inferred, none or unknown, never guessed from the CPV code alone.
05Source health on screen: last successful check, last successful ingest and any open incident.

Sources

[ 08 FEEDS ]

What is indexed today. Coverage per source is stated in the product and via GET /sources.

Source	Region	Scope
TED	EU-wide	The EU Official Journal: above-threshold notices, awards and prior information notices
NATO / NSPA	Alliance	NATO Support and Procurement Agency public opportunities, with attachment text where readable
EU Funding & Tenders	EU programmes	Calls and grants from the European Commission portal
TenderNed	Netherlands	Dutch national platform, defence-relevant notices
Find a Tender	United Kingdom	UK above-threshold notices, defence-relevant
Contracts Finder	United Kingdom	UK below-threshold notices, defence-relevant
PLACSP	Spain	Spanish public sector contracting platform, defence-relevant, original language kept
BOAMP	France	French official procurement bulletin, defence-relevant, original language kept

NCIA is not indexed: its portal is behind a browser challenge and we do not bypass access controls. EDA, OCCAR and German federal notices are on the source inventory but not live.

How it works

[ MECHANICS ]

Each source has a connector that runs on a schedule and records a source check: when it started, whether it paged the source fully, how many notices were created or materially changed, and the error if it failed. A notice that cannot be normalised is stored with its extraction status and notes instead of being dropped.

Deduplication and versions

The same contract often appears on a national platform and in TED. Records are deduplicated and one is marked primary, so a saved search or a sync does not return the same opportunity twice. Each notice also keeps a version history: a new version is written only when its normalised content changes, so whitespace edits or reordered CPV codes do not count as updates.

Defence relevance

A deterministic classifier combines CPV families, a multilingual keyword lexicon, buyer type (defence ministries, NSPA, NCIA, EDA, OCCAR and civil-security bodies) and negative cues. Uncertain cases can go to a language-model second pass. The reason string lists every cue and its weight. Unrelated notices are hidden by default and shown with one checkbox; unclassified ones are never hidden.

Clearance evidence

Stated means the text explicitly asks for a security clearance. Inferred is used only when there is no usable text and the category is inherently classified, and is displayed as “inferred from category only, not confirmed”. None means the text was read and is silent; unknown means there was nothing to read. Being a defence contract is not treated as a clearance cue.

Language

Language is detected per notice. Non-English titles and summaries get an English version alongside the untouched original, and the record states the original language.

Alerts

Saved searches, personal or shared with the company, are evaluated on the server every morning after ingestion. Each keeps a count of new matches since the last run. A digest per person combines new fits from explainable matching, saved-search hits and, for teams using the capture pipeline, overdue actions and near deadlines.

The same feed over the API

[ REST ]

On the Team plan. Full reference in the [API docs](/docs/api/).

curl "https://api.defenseexplorer.com/api/v1/opportunities?source=nato&sortBy=deadline&sortOrder=asc" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer dx_api_…"

{
  "data": [
    {
      "source": "nato",
      "type": "tender",
      "title": "Secure tactical communications",
      "buyer": "NATO Support and Procurement Agency",
      "deadline": "2026-10-01T12:00:00.000Z",
      "documentUrls": ["https://…"],
      "securityClearanceRequired": true
    }
  ],
  "pagination": { "page": 1, "limit": 20, "total": 42, "totalPages": 3 }
}

What it does not do

[ LIMITS ]

Does

+Index eight public sources daily, with source-level health
+Filter national platforms to defence-relevant notices
+Keep the original language and link to official documents
+Label unknowns and inferred clearance as exactly that

Does not

–Cover thousands of regional civil portals; for that, see Tendify alternatives
–Access login-gated portals, classified material or NCIA’s Neo platform
–Guarantee that no notice exists because we did not index it
–Push alerts instantly: “instant” saved searches run on the normal job cadence

Questions

[ 04 ANSWERS ]

How often is data refreshed?

Procurement sources are ingested daily. Saved searches are evaluated each morning after ingestion and deduplication. Dutch parliamentary letters used for early signals are checked weekly. The source health view shows the last successful check per source.

Why only eight sources?

Because every source has to be reliable, defence-filtered and honest about its coverage. Adding a portal we cannot check daily would make the feed look bigger and less trustworthy. The next candidates are listed on our source inventory; tell us which ones you need.

Do you cover NCIA?

Not yet. NCIA’s procurement pages sit behind a browser challenge, and we do not bypass access controls. The connector exists but stays disabled until it can run against the real site legitimately.

What does “defence-relevant” mean for national platforms?

Notices classified as military, dual-use or civil security from their CPV codes, text and buyer. Notices classified unrelated are hidden by default and can be shown with a filter.

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