BidFitBot.

Last updated: 2026-05-02

This page is for portal operators, webmasters, and anyone who notices BidFit traffic in their server logs. We believe transparent crawler identification is table stakes for operating in the public-procurement space.

Who we are

BidFit is a Canadian SaaS that qualifies public-sector tenders for SMB contractors. We read public tender notices on behalf of users who paste a URL. Every crawl is initiated by a real human user requesting a qualification brief on a specific notice — we do not bulk-scrape portals or rebuild your data.

User agent

All BidFit-initiated requests identify themselves with this user-agent string:

If a request to your portal originates from BidFit but does not include this user agent, it is not us. Please report it to bot@bidfit.ca and we will investigate.

What we crawl

• CanadaBuys — federal tender notices via the public listing pages
• BC Bid — provincial notices via the Bonfire-hosted public preview
• MERX — public preview pages only (we do not crawl subscription-gated content)
• Municipal portals — fetched via a generic LLM-based extractor when a user pastes a URL we don't have a hand-tuned adapter for

Crawl frequency

We are request-driven, not a periodic scraper:

We do not crawl recursively. We never follow links into authenticated areas. We do not re-fetch the same notice more than once per hour even if multiple users paste the same URL.

What we store

• The notice URL and the public text content of the notice page
• Extracted metadata (title, buyer, NAICS, closing date, value, location)
• The user's qualification brief (private to that user)

We do not store full attachment files (RFP PDFs, addenda, drawings). We do not republish notice content on a public site. We do not include notice content in search engine indexes.

Rate limiting and politeness

• Maximum 1 concurrent request per portal hostname
• Maximum 2-second pause between same-portal requests during digest sweeps
• Standard 30-second timeout, then we abandon the request
• We respect robots.txt directives that explicitly disallow our user agent
• We respect Retry-After response headers and back off when you ask us to
• We honor Crawl-delay directives

Opt-out

If you operate a portal and would prefer BidFit not access it, two options:

1. Add this to your robots.txt:
   User-agent: BidFitBot Disallow: /
   We will stop within 24 hours of the next robots.txt fetch.
2. Email bot@bidfit.ca with your domain. We will allowlist-block it within 24 hours and confirm in writing.

Either method is sufficient. We will never ignore an opt-out.