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TenderSeal compared with ChatGPT, a bid writer, or doing it yourself
Every way of answering a tender has its place. Here is what each one knows, what it sticks to, and what it costs, so you can pick the right one for the tender in front of you.
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Why not just use ChatGPT, a bid writer, or do it yourself?
General AI is good at a lot of things. Tenders aren’t one of them.
| ChatGPT | A bid writer | Doing it yourself | TenderSeal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Knows how tenders work | No. To ChatGPT, a tender is just another document. | Yes | Depends on your experience | Yes: selection criteria, quality questions, lots, scoring |
| Sticks to the facts | Fills gaps with things that sound right | Yes | Yes | Works from your tender and your documents, and shows the page |
| Writes to the scorecard | Only if you know what to ask | Yes | If you can find it in the pack | Pulls out the scorecard and drafts around it |
| Keeps to word limits and format | Only if you check it yourself | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Knows your business | Only what you paste in each time | After you've briefed them | Yes | Tell it once, used in every draft |
| Cost | A subscription | Around £500 a dayWhere this figure comes from* | Free, until you count the hours | £99 for 3 months: less than two hours of a bid writer's time |
* IT Jobs Watch, UK contract bid writer median daily rate, 6 months to 2 November 2026 (5 rates quoted): itjobswatch.co.uk.
Why not just use ChatGPT, Claude or your own AI agent?
You can, and many people try. General AI doesn’t know how a tender is put together or scored, so you do the prompting: pasting in the pack, finding the scorecard, asking it to stay within the word limit, checking it didn’t fill a gap with something that sounds right. TenderSeal comes set up for tenders: it reads the whole pack, checks eligibility, shows the page behind each answer and drafts to the scoring.
“If you're not great with AI, you know, you do have to prompt it a lot … Whereas this thing, because you've uploaded all your documents and then it just generates the stuff, you know, I think that's a lot easier.”
“Yours is as good as the one I've been training for a long time.”
Why not hire a bid writer?
A good bid writer knows tenders inside out, and for a big, strategic bid one may be worth every penny. The cost is the catch for a small business: the UK median contract rate is around £500 a day (IT Jobs Watch, UK contract bid writer median daily rate, 6 months to 2 November 2026, 5 rates quoted), and they need briefing on your business each time. TenderSeal costs £99 for 3 months, knows your business from the documents you gave it once, and gets you to a first draft you can finish yourself, or hand to a bid writer to polish.
“To get to a first draft of the technical questions has only taken me maybe an hour … an hour, as opposed to days, which is why I'm grinning like a loon.”
Why not just do it yourself?
You know your business best, and you stay the author with TenderSeal too. What it takes off you is the reading: hours with a highlighter, finding the scoring, the pass/fail questions and the one clause on page 405 that rules you out. You keep the judgement, and the final word.
“It has eliminated hours of work. Hours of work for me where I'm sitting with a highlighter, looking through each document, highlighting lines. It has eliminated all of that, Jim.”
What about expensive tender software?
Some tools cost hundreds of pounds a month and need technical settings to get right. TenderSeal is built for people without a bid team: upload the documents and start.
1 clause conflict
It caught a clause conflict that both a manual read and a £300-a-month tool had missed.
IT consultant, UK. Reported second-hand, about a VA who prepares tenders for clients.