Government contracts · Readiness check
Courses sell the dream and mills sell you a free registration. This checker does the arithmetic instead: answer plain questions about your trade, your office, who owns your business, and your SAM status — and get your doors in the order a beginner should walk them, read off the published FAR and SBA rules. Registration is free. Certifications are free. This check is free.
Answer for your business as it stands today — not as you plan to fix it. Bands, not exact figures; nothing is stored. The verdict prints your doors in order: registration, the $15,000 card door, the $15,000–$350,000 band reserved for small businesses, the certifications you screen into, your state's door, and the free help.
Four answers are required — what you sell, your SAM status, your years in business, your state. The rest only sharpen the screening; skip what doesn't apply.
What this checker cannot do. It cannot tell you that you will win a contract, and neither can anyone else — awards belong to contracting officers. It cannot decide a certification; SBA does that. What it can honestly do is read the published rules against your answers and print your doors in the right order, with the rule cited under each one — the step every course charges you to reach and every mill hopes you skip.
The paid kit
The checker prints your doors. The kit is the paper for walking them: the SAM pre-flight pack that keeps a registration out of the rejection queue, your door map filled in, the $15,000-door and simplified-band playbooks, worked capability statements for your trade, the certification packs, the middleman line in full, and the annotated scam-letter file.
$49 one-time payment
A letter or email says your SAM registration is expiring and asks for money. Companies charge $349 for a renewal that costs $0 — and count the deadline from the day you paid them, not from your real date. Answer six questions about the notice and get the verdict from GSA's own tells.
Run the SAM Scam DecoderA course told you to win contracts and subcontract everything. The law draws a line through that plan — 50%, 85%, 75%, by contract type — and crossing it can void the award. Describe your structure and see which side of the line it lands on. It will never tell you "you are legal." It will show you the line.
Draw the Middleman LineFree help exists: APEX Accelerators — counselors paid by the Department of Defense — will sit with you one-on-one, help with your registration, your certifications, and your first bids, and charge you nothing. Find yours at apexaccelerators.us. This checker gives you your verdict tonight and the papers to bring them; it does not replace them, and we name them here because a seller who hides free help from you is telling you something about himself.
The registration mills charge $599 to do a free registration. The certification mills charge up to $6,700 to file free applications. The dream-books charge $9.95 to teach a structure the contract clauses forbid. This site's whole position is the opposite trade: the rules are published, so we publish them back — with the free counselors named on the same page as the price.
Nothing. Registration in SAM.gov is always free — GSA says so in its own words, and the government will never ask you to pay to register, update your registration, or renew. Companies charge $599 to $899 to do this free registration for you. This site prints the same sentence everywhere for a reason: it is the sentence the mills hope you never read.
$15,000. It was $10,000 for years, and a lot of courses and templates still print the old number — the threshold was raised by FAR Case 2024-001, effective October 1, 2025. At or under $15,000 a federal buyer can pay with a government purchase card without competitive quotes, which is why it is the honest first-sale door. The simplified acquisition band above it now runs to $350,000, and those buys are reserved for small businesses.
A business with no past performance can register, can sell under the $15,000 card door, and can bid in the $15,000–$350,000 band — those doors do not require a track record, though buyers still judge your response. What no honest seller can promise you is winning: award decisions belong to contracting officers, and anyone who sells you a win is selling you the sentence, not the contract.
No. Certifications (8(a), WOSB, HUBZone, SDVOSB) open set-aside doors, but the card door and the open small-business band do not require any of them — a popular course sells 'you don't need any certifications' as a revelation; it is simply true, and it is free to read here. Where a certification fits your facts, it is free to apply for through SBA, whatever the application mills charge.
On a set-aside contract, no — that structure is the one the rules are written against. FAR 52.219-14 caps what you may pay subcontractors who don't share your status (50% for services and supplies, 85% for general construction, 75% for specialty trades), FAR 52.215-23 refuses pass-through charges where you add no value, and the ostensible-subcontractor rule can void the award. The Middleman Line page on this site draws the exact line against your planned structure — free.
Yes — APEX Accelerators, funded by the Department of Defense, give free one-on-one counseling: registration help, certification help, bid matching, even proposal review. They are appointment-based and most beginners never hear of them, which is the entire reason the paid market exists. This checker names them on purpose; the kit's papers are built to bring to them.