Frequently Asked Questions

RFI Hawk is an opportunity scoring and proposal drafting platform designed to help small businesses and non-traditional government contractors find, evaluate, and respond to federal contracting opportunities. RFI Hawk pulls active contract opportunities from SAM.gov every day, and adds federal grants from Grants.gov, research announcements from DARPA, DIU and NSTXL, SBIR and STTR solicitations from SBIR.gov, and civilian agency postings from FedConnect. Award history comes from USAspending.gov and SAM.gov contract award data. It scores each opportunity it ingests against your company profile and helps you draft proposal responses using your own past work and company data.

RFI Hawk is designed for small businesses pursuing federal contracts, including Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Businesses, 8(a) firms, HUBZone companies, Woman-Owned Small Businesses, non-traditional defense contractors, and any company where the same people finding opportunities are also writing proposals. If you have the capability to do the work but the proposal process is what holds you back, this platform was built for you.

No. RFI Hawk is designed to guide you through the proposal process, from understanding the solicitation requirements to generating compliant draft sections. That said, the platform works best when you review, edit, and refine the AI-generated content using your subject matter expertise. It is a tool that amplifies your knowledge, not a replacement for it.

Absolutely. RFI Hawk is designed to give a single person the same capture management and proposal response capabilities that large contractors staff entire departments to handle. You do not need a team to use the platform. You become the team.

Tokens are the unit of measurement for AI processing. Think of them roughly as pieces of words. When RFI Hawk analyzes a solicitation, generates a proposal section, or answers a question in the workspace chat, it uses tokens to process your request. Your subscription includes a monthly token allowance: 500,000 on Starter, 2,000,000 on Pro, and 5,000,000 shared on Team. Scoring opportunities uses no tokens at all. Drafting a typical proposal section uses about 5,000 tokens. Unused monthly tokens roll over for up to two billing cycles, up to 1.5 times your monthly allowance. Your token usage is tracked on your Billing page so you always know where you stand. If you need more tokens than your plan includes, token packs are available for purchase any time. Token packs cost $5.99 to $14.99 per 100,000 tokens depending on your plan. Purchased token packs are valid for 90 days from purchase and are used after your monthly allowance.

RFI Hawk scores each opportunity against your company profile on a 0-100 scale. The score is based on how well the opportunity matches your NAICS codes, set-aside eligibility, agency experience, technology keywords, and domain expertise. The more information you provide in your profile and the more documents you upload, the more precise your scores become. Opportunities from sources that do not use traditional NAICS codes, like DARPA BAAs or OTAs, are scored using keyword and domain relevance instead.

The proposal writer generates draft sections based on the solicitation requirements and your uploaded company data, including past proposals, capability statements, resumes, and past performance references. The output is a working draft, not a finished product. It follows the solicitation's structure, addresses compliance requirements, and uses your company's actual experience and terminology. You review, edit, and finalize the content before submission. The AI handles the heavy lifting of first-draft generation so you can focus on strategy and quality.

Your uploaded documents, company profile, and proposal content are used exclusively to improve your experience on the platform. Your data is not shared with other users, used to train AI models, or sold to third parties. Documents you upload are processed and stored securely to power the proposal writing and scoring features for your account only.

Absolutely not. Your data belongs to you. We will never sell, share, or expose your proprietary information to anyone. Your proposals, pricing strategies, past performance narratives, and competitive intelligence are your competitive edge, and we protect them accordingly. Your data is only accessible by you and your authorized team members. We do not use your content to train AI models. Our business model is subscriptions and token packs, not your data.

RFI Hawk includes several built-in compliance tools designed for federal contractors. The CMMC readiness tracker helps you assess and document your cybersecurity maturity level against CMMC requirements. The FAR/DFARS navigator lets you search, read, and understand federal acquisition regulations and defense supplements without leaving the platform. The supply chain transparency module tracks supply chain compliance requirements relevant to your opportunities. The regulatory change feed monitors updates to FAR, DFARS, and other acquisition regulations so you are aware of changes that affect your proposals and contracts.

Yes. While RFI Hawk is not a dedicated ATO tool, several features support the process. The CMMC readiness tracker helps you organize evidence of your cybersecurity controls. The compliance clause checker identifies security-related requirements in solicitations that may require ATO documentation. The document library gives you a central place to store and manage the policies, procedures, and evidence artifacts that ATO assessors typically request. For companies pursuing contracts that require Authorization to Operate, these tools help you stay organized and prepared.

Good proposal consultants bring strategic insight, red team experience, and relationships that are genuinely valuable. RFI Hawk is designed to complement that expertise, not replace it. The platform handles the high-volume work that eats up hours: opportunity analysis, compliance mapping, first-draft generation, and document formatting. That means consultants can focus on strategy, win themes, and review rather than starting from scratch. If you work with consultants, RFI Hawk makes every hour they spend more productive. If you handle proposals in-house, it gives you a capable starting point so you are not building from a blank page.

Most platforms in this space focus on opportunity discovery, pipeline management, or market intelligence. RFI Hawk is designed to go further by integrating opportunity discovery with proposal drafting with an AI writing assistant in a single workflow. You can go from finding an opportunity to having a working draft without leaving the platform. We also pull from sources beyond SAM.gov, including DARPA BAAs, the NSTXL consortium portal, and SBIR listings, and normalize everything into a single searchable feed. The platform is purpose-built for small businesses, not adapted from enterprise tools designed for large primes.

RFI Hawk is designed to augment your team, not eliminate it. For small businesses without dedicated proposal staff, the platform covers the functions typically spread across capture managers, proposal writers, and compliance reviewers, giving one or two people the output of a much larger team. For companies that already have proposal professionals or work with consultants, RFI Hawk accelerates their workflow by handling first drafts, compliance tracking, and document production. Complex proposals for high-value contracts still benefit from human judgment, subject matter expertise, and strategic review. The platform handles the production work so your people can focus on the thinking.

Yes. The Free plan lets you search and match opportunities, see the full fit score on every match, keep a watchlist, run a CMMC self-assessment, and read every Academy course, with 25,000 one-time trial tokens for AI work. AI opportunity analysis, bid or no-bid worksheets, and a monthly capability statement start on Starter ($59 per month). Proposal drafting, document upload, and deep research start on Pro ($149 per month).

You can buy a token pack at any time from your Billing page. Token packs cost $5.99 to $14.99 per 100,000 tokens depending on your plan. Purchased token packs are valid for 90 days from purchase and are used after your monthly allowance. Your subscription allowance refills every billing month, and unused monthly tokens roll over for up to two billing cycles, up to 1.5 times your monthly allowance. We will notify you when your token balance is running low so you are not caught off guard.

Monthly plans can be cancelled at any time. Annual plans run for twelve months. You can cancel from your Billing page, and your access continues through the end of your billing period.

The Team plan is designed for capture teams that collaborate on proposals. It costs $499 per month or $4,990 per year and includes up to 10 users, 5,000,000 shared tokens per month, up to 5 company profiles, collaborative proposal workspaces, section assignments, and a team dashboard. For organizations with more than 10 users, we offer custom Enterprise pricing with SSO and dedicated support. Contact us for details.

Pursuit costs of 3 to 5 percent of contract value are a commonly cited rule of thumb among proposal professionals. On a $5 million contract that is $150,000 to $250,000 in labor, consultants and production. For small businesses without dedicated proposal staff, these costs can be even more impactful because they often pull billable employees off revenue-generating work to write proposals.

Win rates vary significantly by agency, contract type, competition level, and company experience. According to SBA's FY2025 scorecard (released June 25, 2026), small businesses received 27.98 percent of federal prime contract dollars. That is a share of spending, not the odds of winning any single bid. Whatever your own win rate turns out to be, the math has to work on the losses too.

An OTA (Other Transaction Authority) is an alternative contracting mechanism used by the Department of Defense and other agencies to quickly fund prototype and production projects outside the traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) process. OTAs are often faster and more flexible than standard contracts. A BAA (Broad Agency Announcement) is a competitive solicitation used primarily by research agencies like DARPA to solicit proposals for basic and applied research. BAAs typically accept white papers and proposals on a rolling basis across broad technology areas.