Tender management and compliance software
built exclusively for care.
Most care providers manage tenders in a spreadsheet, store policies in a filing cabinet, and pay a consultant £3,000 every time a framework opens. CareBids replaces all three — tender alerts, AI bid writing, and CQC-compliant policies in a single platform, from £55 a month.
No competitor operates across both tender management and policy management simultaneously. This is the only platform where you can go from a new framework notice to a submitted bid response without leaving the tab.
Spreadsheets, filing cabinets, and a consultant on speed dial
We've spoken to dozens of registered managers, operations directors, and care home owners over the past two years. The procurement and compliance picture is almost always the same — and almost always inefficient.
Tender opportunities are tracked in Excel (when they're tracked at all). A local authority publishes a domiciliary care framework on Find a Tender; the registered manager finds out three weeks later when a commissioner mentions it in a review meeting. The deadline closed ten days ago. That's a missed contract worth — in a typical spot-purchase arrangement — £40,000 to £80,000 over 12 months.
When a provider does catch a tender in time, the response takes 40 hours or more to write. The quality sections alone — staffing governance, safeguarding, infection control, social value — require drawing on CQC inspection records, policy documents, and workforce data that lives in three separate systems. So the provider pays a bid writing consultant. A good one charges £1,500–£4,000 per submission.
Meanwhile, the policy library lives in a mix of Word documents, a legacy compliance platform, and the registered manager's memory. The CQC's Regulation 17 governance requirements are clear on maintaining up-to-date policies — but keeping them current alongside everything else is a background task that slips.
This is not a niche problem. It's the operating reality for the vast majority of the 20,000+ CQC-registered adult social care providers in England. The tools exist to fix it. Until CareBids, no single platform addressed the full picture.
40+ hours
Average time to write a care tender response manually
£1,500–£4,000
Typical bid writing consultant fee per submission
£22bn+
Adult social care spend by English councils in 2024/25
Six modules. One subscription.
CareBids was built exclusively for UK care providers — which means every module starts from care-sector regulation, not a generic enterprise template that someone has adapted.
Tender Alerts
Live monitoring of 14 UK procurement portals. Every NHS, local authority, and DPS opportunity matched to your care type, location, and CQC registration before it reaches your inbox.
See tender alertsAI Bid Writing
Draft quality sections — staffing governance, safeguarding, infection control, social value — in minutes rather than weeks. Responses draw on your actual CQC inspection data.
See AI bid writingPolicy Library
CQC-aligned policies updated automatically when guidance changes. Coverage includes the Health and Social Care Act 2008 Regulated Activities Regulations 2014, Duty of Candour, and Regulation 17 governance.
See policy managementCQC Dashboard
Your inspection history, KLOE ratings, and compliance signals in one view. The dashboard flags where your public CQC record could be stronger — and how that affects tender competitiveness.
Platform overviewDPS Support
Dynamic Purchasing Systems are permanently open but permanently demanding. CareBids monitors every active DPS lot, manages your selection questionnaire library, and alerts you when a new mini-competition drops.
See DPS supportChildren's Home Module
Statement of Purpose generation under Regulation 16, Ofsted SC1/SC2 application support, SCCIF-aligned policy templates, and Regulation 45 review guidance. The only platform built for children's home operators.
Children's home moduleEvery care provider needs these three things working together
The sector has always had tools for each of these individually. No one had built them together — until CareBids.
Tender Management
CareBids monitors Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, NHS Supply Chain, and 11 further portals — including regional platforms like Sell2Wales and eTendersNI — for care-relevant procurement notices. The Procurement Act 2023 , which came into force in February 2025, has increased the volume of contracts that commissioners must publish publicly — which means the opportunity pool is larger than it's ever been.
Every incoming opportunity is run through our 38-point scoring engine, which assesses it against your CQC registration, location, care type, contract value range, and accreditation requirements. You only see tenders worth your time. The ones that pass go straight into your pipeline dashboard, with deadlines, decision support data, and a one-click link to start your AI bid draft.
We've found that the biggest problem isn't whether providers can win tenders — it's whether they know the tenders exist in time to enter. The scoring engine is secondary to the alert itself.
AI Bid Writing
This is the module that replaces the bid writing consultant. When you open a tender in CareBids, the AI drafts the quality sections using your CQC inspection data, your policy library, and the specific ITT requirements — not a generic template.
The sections it covers include: staffing ratios under the Health and Social Care Act 2008, social value commitments under the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012, workforce development plans aligned to Skills for Care standards, safeguarding governance, and infection prevention and control (IPC) protocols post-COVID-19. For children's home tenders, the module understands LCSA commissioning requirements and generates responses calibrated to the Children's Homes Regulations 2015.
The draft is not the finished submission — you review it, add your organisation's specific evidence, and edit the narrative. But it covers 60–75% of what you'd write manually and cuts response time from 40+ hours to under 10. Over a full year, for a provider submitting four tenders, that represents roughly 120 hours and £10,000–£16,000 in avoided consultant fees.
Policy Management
A policy library is only useful if it's current. CareBids maintains CQC-aligned policies covering the Health and Social Care Act 2008 Regulated Activities Regulations 2014, Duty of Candour under Regulation 20, and the Fundamental Standards — and updates them automatically when CQC guidance or legislation changes, so you're not doing that manually.
What distinguishes the CareBids policy module from standalone compliance platforms is the connection to procurement. When the AI bid writing module drafts a tender response and references your IPC policy, it pulls the current version from your policy library — no manual lookup, no risk of submitting an outdated reference. The two modules talk to each other. That connection is why we built them in the same platform rather than as separate products.
For children's home operators (who are registered with Ofsted, not CQC), the policy library includes SCCIF-aligned templates under the Children's Homes Regulations 2015 — an area where platforms like QCS and Bettal have limited coverage.
One platform. Tender alerts, AI bid writing, and CQC-compliant policies — all included.
Book a 20-minute demo and see how CareBids goes from a new framework notice to a submitted bid response without leaving the tab.
Who CareBids is built for
Each part of the care sector has its own procurement norms, regulatory frameworks, and commissioner expectations. Getting those distinctions wrong costs you the contract.
Content reviewed by registered care managers and procurement specialists
Residential Care Homes
Spot-purchase contracts, block-purchase frameworks, and NHS Continuing Healthcare placements each carry distinct scoring criteria. CareBids pre-loads the social value weighting, Regulation 17 governance evidence, and staffing ratio substantiation into residential care templates.
Domiciliary Care
Dedicated pageMost home care providers don't realise their local authority has moved to a DPS until the old framework closes. CareBids watches every active DPS opening and alerts you the moment a new lot is published.
Children's Homes
Dedicated pageChildren's home tenders require LCSA-specific safeguarding governance, Regulation 12 quality assurance evidence, and a stable workforce narrative. CareBids templates start from the Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015.
Supported Living
Supported living procurement spans NHS Integrated Care Boards, local authorities, and NHS England — appearing on different portals with different frameworks. CareBids aggregates them and maps each to the Care Act 2014 personalisation requirements.
Nursing Homes
Specialist and dementia care tenders reward KLOE-level clinical governance evidence. CareBids pulls your CQC inspection data at KLOE level so your responses carry the detail commissioners are looking for.
Your CQC rating isn't just a badge — it's bid data
A commissioner scoring a residential care tender told us — off the record — that they can tell immediately when a bid response has been written without reference to the actual CQC inspection report. The providers who win describe their Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-Led ratings in specific terms, with evidence. The providers who lose submit a policy summary.
CareBids pulls your CQC inspection data at KLOE level — not just the headline Outstanding/Good/Requires Improvement judgement — and uses it in two ways. First, the 38-point scoring engine assesses whether your current rating is competitive enough for a given tender before you invest time in it. (Why spend 10 hours on a bid you're unlikely to win on quality grounds?) Second, the AI bid writing module draws on the specific evidence categories from your last inspection when drafting the quality sections.
The integration updates automatically after each new CQC publication cycle. If your rating improves following a re-inspection, your tender competitiveness scores across open opportunities update to reflect it. No manual data entry. No risk of submitting a bid that references an outdated inspection.
Technically, the integration uses the CQC Public API provider endpoint. Every 24 hours, CareBids fetches your Provider ID, current overall rating, inspection history, enforcement actions, and registration status. That data is available in the bid writing module during draft generation — so when the AI populates a quality governance section, it is drawing on your live regulatory record, not a cached snapshot from your onboarding session.
CQC registers and inspects adult social care providers under the Health and Social Care Act 2008. The Single Assessment Framework introduced in 2023 replaced the previous KLOE structure with quality statements — CareBids maps both frameworks to ensure bid responses remain current regardless of which assessment version your last inspection used. See CQC's assessment framework guidance for the full quality statement structure.
Published pricing. No sales call required.
CareBids publishes all its prices publicly at carebids.co.uk/pricing . You don't need to submit your details to a sales team to find out what the platform costs. That transparency is deliberate — we know that care home operators managing tight margins need to plan costs without a chase.
Starter
£55/mo
Annual billing. Tender alerts, AI bid writing, policy library — full platform. Single location.
Professional
£119/mo
Annual billing. All Starter features plus CQC Dashboard, DPS support, and children's home module.
Multi-site
Contact us
Unlimited sites, dedicated account manager, custom onboarding. Quoted per organisation, not per location.
CareBids vs the patchwork: QCS + a consultant + Excel
The honest comparison isn't CareBids versus a single competitor. It's CareBids versus the three-tool combination that most care providers are currently running — whether they realise they're paying for all three or not.
Here's what a single-site care home operator typically spends on procurement and compliance across a year: QCS or Bettal at £100–£150/month (£1,200–£1,800/year), plus one or two tender submissions with a bid writing consultant at £1,500–£4,000 each (£3,000–£8,000/year), plus the uncosted hours of the registered manager tracking opportunities manually. The total comes to £4,200–£9,800 per year before anyone has calculated the salary cost of the 40-hour submission. CareBids Professional is £1,428/year on annual billing. Why does that gap exist? Because the tools were never designed to work together — and combining them never made economic sense.
| Feature | CareBids (all-in) | QCS + Consultant + Excel |
|---|---|---|
| Policy library (CQC-aligned) | Included | £100–£150/mo (QCS) |
| Live tender alerts — 14 portals | Included | Manual search or not done |
| AI bid writing | Included | £1,500–£4,000 per submission |
| 38-point tender scoring engine | Included | Not available |
| DPS application support | Included | Consultant extra |
| Children's home / Ofsted module | Included | Not available |
| CQC profile integration | Included | Manual |
| Opportunity tracking / pipeline | Included | Excel / manual |
| Transparent published pricing | ||
| Estimated monthly cost (single site) | From £55/mo | £300–£500/mo (+ per-submission fees) |
Comparison based on publicly available pricing and industry feedback as of March 2026. QCS pricing is based on market feedback — QCS does not publish prices publicly. Read the full QCS comparison or the Bettal comparison .
What care operators tell us
We're 150+ providers into our beta. The patterns are consistent. Three situations drive the decision to switch to CareBids more than any others.
The missed deadline
A registered manager finds a framework reference on a commissioner's newsletter. They look it up on Find a Tender. Deadline: two weeks ago. One missed residential placement contract — say, 12 weeks at £900/week — is worth more than two years of a CareBids subscription. The operational cost of not knowing is higher than the cost of knowing.
The consultant invoice
The most common trigger for Professional tier sign-ups: a provider has just received a £3,500 bill from a bid writing consultant and wants to know if there's a better way. The AI module isn't a replacement for every submission — but it drafts the quality sections in minutes rather than weeks and covers the majority of what consultants were being paid to produce.
The children's home gap
Children's home operators register with Ofsted, not CQC — and the compliance tools designed for adult social care have limited Ofsted-specific content. When a provider needs a Statement of Purpose under Regulation 16 of the Children's Homes Regulations 2015, QCS doesn't generate one. CareBids does. That's the whole reason we built the module.
We're building our verified testimonials section as providers complete their first tender cycles on the platform. In the meantime, the 14-day free trial gives you everything you need to judge it for yourself — no credit card, no setup fee, no sales call required. Connect your CQC registration number and run live tender searches in under 20 minutes. If it doesn't save you time in the first session, book a demo and tell us what didn't work . We'd rather know.
Bid content library — your response bank
The AI draft is a starting point, not a finished document. The bid content library lets you save, tag, and reuse the sections you've refined — so your best safeguarding narrative, your strongest social value statement, and your workforce development evidence are available for every future submission. Over time the library becomes the institutional knowledge base for your procurement function.
Platform questions we get asked
The only care-specific platform that does it all. Start free — no setup fee.
14 days, full access, no credit card required. Connect your CQC registration, run live tender searches, and generate your first AI bid draft — all in the same session. Over 150 providers are already using the platform.
Content accurate as of March 2026. HSCA 2008 Regulations .