Guide

TenderLink and Stipple: an alert subscription against a free search

illion TenderLink is the largest published coverage claim in Australian tendering: 3,300 sources monitored daily, 41,000 opportunities a year, 138,000 award records. We hold 2,034 tenders across 23 nightly sources. This page does not pretend otherwise — it explains what each product is for, using only what TenderLink publishes about itself.

By Stipple Research7 min readUpdated 13 September 2026
Key takeaways
  • TenderLink publishes the largest coverage claim in the market: "3,300+ sources monitored daily", "41,000+ opportunities each year, worth approximately $60 billion annually" and "138,000+ award records". We do not match any of those numbers.
  • It does not publish its prices. The site says "plans from less than $3 a day" and "Flexible monthly subscriptions – no long-term commitment", but the plans themselves require contact.
  • Its distinctive asset is exclusivity: "600+ exclusive Buyer Partners (who publish 1 in 6 public tenders)". Open aggregation cannot reach material published only to a private portal.
  • Stipple is free to browse with no sign-in, names the source on every result, and publishes a registry of every source it fails to cover and why. TenderLink publishes none of those.
  • They are different purchases. TenderLink sells the widest possible net delivered to an inbox. Stipple sells search and capability matching over a smaller corpus you can inspect for free.
Evidence path
  1. 01

    Read their public claims

    Start with the material.

  2. 02

    Quote, do not test

    Add one more signal.

  3. 03

    Query our own API

    Add one more signal.

  4. 04

    Name the gap

    Add one more signal.

  5. 05

    Explain the difference

    Make a careful call.

01

What TenderLink publishes about itself

Short answer

As at 13 September 2026 its supplier page states 3,300+ sources monitored daily, 41,000+ opportunities each year, 600+ exclusive buyer partners publishing one in six public tenders, 138,000+ award records and 946 industry categories.

illion TenderLink makes the most specific and the largest coverage claims of any Australian tender service. Its supplier page states “3,300+ sources monitored daily across all industries” and “41,000+ opportunities each year, worth approximately $60 billion annually”. It also claims “600+ exclusive Buyer Partners (who publish 1 in 6 public tenders)”, “138,000+ award records” and “946 industry categories and sub-categories”.

We have not tested any of that and we are not going to imply doubt we cannot support. These are their published figures, retrieved on 13 September 2026, and they are considerably larger than ours on every axis.

On price the site is less forthcoming. It advertises “plans from less than $3 a day” and “Flexible monthly subscriptions – no long-term commitment”, but the plans themselves are not published — pricing requires contacting them or subscribing to see it.

illion TenderLink (their published claims)Stipple (live API, 12 Sep 2026)
Coverage"3,300+ sources monitored daily"23 nightly sources plus verified snapshots
Volume"41,000+ opportunities each year"2,034 tenders currently held
Awards"138,000+ award records"None — opportunities only
Categories"946 industry categories and sub-categories"Source taxonomy, not re-classified
Exclusive supply"600+ exclusive Buyer Partners"None
Price"plans from less than $3 a day"; plans not publishedBrowsing free, no sign-in; matching metered
02

The exclusivity claim is the one that matters

Short answer

TenderLink states it has 600+ exclusive buyer partners who publish one in six public tenders. If accurate, that is material no open aggregator can reach, including us.

Most of the gap between a large aggregator and a small one is effort: more portals scraped, more sources maintained. That gap closes over time. Exclusivity does not.

TenderLink states that more than 600 buyer organisations publish through it as exclusive partners, and that between them they account for one in six public tenders. A buyer who publishes only to a private portal is invisible to any service that aggregates public sources, however thorough that service is. If the claim holds, roughly a sixth of the market is structurally out of our reach and out of the reach of every other open aggregator.

We cannot verify the proportion and we are not going to guess at it. What we can say is what it implies for a supplier: if your buyers publish exclusively through TenderLink, no free alternative will show you their work, and that is a reason to pay rather than a reason to shop around.

03

You are choosing between an inbox and a search

Short answer

TenderLink delivers matching tenders to email within 24 hours of publication. Stipple is a corpus you search and filter for free, with capability matching over it.

TenderLink’s model is notification. You describe what you want across its 946 categories, and matching opportunities arrive by email. That suits a supplier who already knows their market, has decided tendering is worth the effort, and wants nothing to slip past.

Stipple’s model is search. Browsing and filtering the whole corpus is free and needs no sign-in, so you can look at what your state’s buyers actually publish before committing to anything. The paid part is capability matching: paste your website, and the corpus ranks against what your business does, naming the requirements each tender carries that you have not evidenced.

The two are not mutually exclusive and, on the numbers, a supplier serious about volume would be poorly served by treating them as such. What we would argue is the sequence: look for free first, understand your market, and then decide whether an unpriced subscription earns its place.

04

The one thing we publish that they do not

Short answer

Our source registry lists every source we attempt, its status, and the reason it returned nothing — including login walls and blocked automated access. No equivalent exists for TenderLink.

A coverage claim is only as good as its accounting. “3,300+ sources monitored daily” is a real statement about effort, but it does not say how many returned results today, how many are behind a login, or how many are duplicates of each other.

Our registry answers those questions about us, publicly, at an endpoint anyone can query. It records that South Australia is behind a “login wall: the listing needs a free supplier account”, that Charles Sturt Council “blocks automated access on every path tried”, and that some councils are redundant because their own pages route tenders through VendorPanel, which we already ingest.

That is a smaller and less flattering picture than a headline source count. It is also checkable, and it is the reason the 2,034 tenders we claim is a number rather than a marketing figure.

05

How we checked

Every TenderLink figure on this page was taken from illion.tenderlink.com on 13 September 2026 and is quoted or closely paraphrased. We did not subscribe, test coverage, or estimate anything the site does not publish. Claims and prices change; if you are reading this well after September 2026, check the current page.

Our figures come from the live tender source registry: 2,034 tenders across 23 nightly sources, run 948479844c50, 12 September 2026. That endpoint is public and returns the same numbers to you as to us, including every source that returned nothing and why.

This page is written by one of the two products it compares, which you should weigh accordingly. We have tried to make that bias harmless by quoting their claims without challenge and stating plainly where those claims exceed ours.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

How much does TenderLink cost?

illion TenderLink does not publish its prices. As at 13 September 2026 its supplier page advertises "plans from less than $3 a day" and "Flexible monthly subscriptions – no long-term commitment", but the plans themselves require contacting them. Of the major Australian tender services, only Australian Tenders publishes a price list.

How many tenders does TenderLink cover?

Its own page claims "3,300+ sources monitored daily" and "41,000+ opportunities each year, worth approximately $60 billion annually", plus "138,000+ award records". We have not tested those figures. Our live corpus held 2,034 tenders on 12 September 2026, so TenderLink’s published claims are substantially larger than ours.

Is there a free alternative to TenderLink?

Browsing and filtering the whole Stipple corpus is free and needs no sign-in, and every government portal is free to search individually. But TenderLink states it has 600+ exclusive buyer partners publishing one in six public tenders — if that holds, material published only through their portal is not available anywhere free.

Who owns TenderLink?

The service is presented as illion TenderLink. The footer of its supplier page as at 13 September 2026 also references Experian. We have not researched the corporate structure beyond what those pages show.

Does Stipple have award data like TenderLink?

No. TenderLink states 138,000+ award records. Our corpus holds published opportunities only — no awards, no supplier profiles and no contract values. If you need to research who won past contracts, we cannot help with that today.

Sources

Sources and further reading

  1. 01illion TenderLink for suppliers (retrieved 13 September 2026)
  2. 02Stipple tender source registry — every source, its status and why it failed
  3. 03Stipple tender search — the corpus this page counts

Educational guidance, not a forensic certification. Detection technologies and standards change; review material decisions against current evidence.

Look at the market before you price a subscription

Browsing the whole corpus is free and needs no account. See what your state’s buyers actually publish, then decide what an alert service is worth to you.

Search the tenders free