cost saving
Three ledgers. Two of them are invisible.
Finding tenders costs you money in three places. One of them is on your bank statement. The other two are not, which is exactly why they are the expensive ones.
Tend.ai is the only service in Botswana that does the whole job — reading every source and ruling on eligibility against your own PPRA registration — without anybody on your payroll doing any of it. What follows is the arithmetic, in full, including the number that never makes it into a set of books.
ledger one — the visible one
P120,000a year, for a seat that still cannot cover 42 sources
A person whose job includes watching tenders costs about P10,000 a month in Botswana — that is our own operations salary line, and you should substitute yours. Call it P120,000 a year before leave, training, a laptop, and the month you spend replacing them when they go.
That seat cannot cover 42 sources four times a day. Nobody can. They will do a morning round, catch the portals that are easy, skim what is in front of them, and never once open a Gazette page-scan and read it properly, because it arrives as an image and not as text.
Tend.ai is P1,825 a year. The saving is P118,175 — about 98.5% — and the coverage goes up, not down.
P5 a day ÷ 42 sources = 12 thebe per source. ÷ 168 readings a day = 3 thebe per reading.
ledger two — the one you pay in evenings
P26,400a year of your own hours, at the same rate
If you do the round yourself you are not saving the P10,000. You are paying it in your own time at a worse rate, because the hour you spend on the Mmegi classifieds is an hour not spent on site, with a client, or on the bid you are already holding.
A serious daily round across 42 sources is about 90 minutes — one pass, not four. Over 22 working days that is 33 hours a month. Valued at the same seat's hourly cost of P66.67, at 150 productive hours a month, that is P2,200 a month, or P26,400 a year, spent on a task with no margin in it.
That is what an opportunity cost is: not what the round costs you, but what those same hours were worth doing something else.
ledger three — the one with no paperwork
P1,825a year, against one job you never heard about
A lost bid leaves a paper trail. A missed one leaves nothing — no letter, no debrief, no line in the books. It is the only business loss that is completely silent, which is why it never gets budgeted for and never gets fixed.
Price it once and it stops being invisible. A single district-council job at P480,000 carries, at a working margin, more profit than two hundred years of this service. You do not have to win it. You have to have known about it.
P1,825 a year is less than one job you never heard about. That is the whole argument, and it only has to be right once.
If you are already holding a bid, there is a fourth cost. A submission that was never responsive costs you the preparation and ties up the bid security while it fails. A P500 pre-submission evaluation returns a plain do-not-submit before either is spent — on a P480,000 notice, bid security alone is typically 1–2% of the value, so check your notice.
your numbers
Put your own numbers in.
Worked example: 8 hours a week spent looking for tenders, valued at the hourly cost of a P10,000 a month seat, is P27,733 a year. Tend.ai is P1,825. You keep P25,908.
8 × 52 × P66.67. One P480,000 job you would have missed pays for roughly 26 years of the service at a 10% margin. Turn scripting on to put your own figures in.
and when you have to write the bid
A bid team costs the same in the months you are not bidding.
| A bids officer on payroll | Tend.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed cost | P120,000 a year, tender or no tender | Nothing when idle |
| Cost per bid, at ten bids a year | P12,000 | Quoted per job, in conversation |
| Sources watched | As many as the day allows | 42, every one, four times a day |
| Gazette page-scans read | Rarely — they are images, not text | Two OCR engines, cross-checked |
| Eligibility ruled on | From memory | Four tests, traced on every alert |
| Recruitment, leave, training, a laptop | Yours | Not yours |
| Notice to stop | A month, and a conversation | None. No card on file |
Compilation is quoted per job, on the phone, by the compiler who will deliver it — never off a rate card. The point is not that it is cheap. The point is that it costs you nothing in the eleven months you are not bidding.
Does this replace an employee?
It replaces one duty completely — the daily reading and the eligibility ruling — for about 1.5% of what that duty costs inside a salary. It does not replace estimating, site work or client relationships, and we would not pretend otherwise.
Do I pay on quiet days?
Yes. Five pula, whether or not the morning turns anything up. The work of reading 42 sources four times a day happens whether or not it turns anything up for you specifically, and we would rather say that plainly than dress the pricing up.
Is there a cheaper way to buy it?
Bundles: P32 for seven days, P120 for thirty, P315 for ninety. At the ninety-day bundle the effective annual cost is about P1,278 — under three and a half pula a day. The full price page has the rest.
What we will not claim
That you will never miss a tender again, and that this will win you work. We supply eligibility and coverage, not outcomes. Six of the 42 sources are still being verified before their notices enter alerts, and every alert names the source it came from so you can check us.
stop paying for this in missed jobs