Federal Grants — find funding you are actually eligible for

Federal Grant Fit Scanner — Grants.gov Eligibility Filter + Prior-Award Intelligence

▶ Use it free — no signup: wyattpalm2-eng.github.io/grant-fit-scanner

Runs entirely in your browser. No account, no backend, nothing uploaded or stored.

Top 5 matches free. Unlock the full ranked list for $2 in USDC — paid directly to the operator's wallet and verified on-chain in your browser. No account, no card, no processor.

Maintainer: payment setup and wallet notes are in CRYPTO.md; the card-payment alternative is in ACTIVATE.md.

Stop reading grant announcements you were never allowed to apply for.

Every other Grants.gov tool hands you a list. This one hands you a shortlist — live federal opportunities ranked by whether your specific organization can realistically win them, with the reasoning shown for every single score.

Point it at your org profile. Get back grants you are actually eligible for, that you actually have time to write, sized to what you actually need, with a read on who has been winning the money before you.

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What makes this different from a Grants.gov scraper

A scraper returns rows. This returns judgment, and shows its work.

	Typical Grants.gov scraper	Federal Grant Fit Scanner
Eligibility	Dumps the raw text field	Hard mechanical gate on the federal applicant-type codes
Deadlines	Prints a date	Days remaining vs. time you need to write it
Award size	Prints a number	Compared against what you asked for
Competition	Nothing	Who actually won this program before, and for how much
Scoring	None, or a black box	Every point traced to a named fact

The eligibility gate is the whole point

Grants.gov publishes machine-readable applicant-type codes on every opportunity. A 501(c)(3) is code 12. A small business is 23. A federally recognized tribal government is 07.

This actor filters on those codes server-side, so you never even download the grants your organization is legally barred from winning. In live testing, a small business and a tribal government scanning the same database got result sets with zero overlap. That is the difference between a list and a shortlist.

It never guesses. If an opportunity publishes no applicant types, or only says "Others — see text", you get NEEDS_REVIEW, not a false green light. Absence of evidence is never reported as eligibility.

Prior-award intelligence nobody else gives you

For each opportunity's CFDA program number, the actor pulls real reported federal awards from USAspending.gov and tells you the median award, the largest, and who received them.

That single number reframes an opportunity. A $250,000 request against a program whose median prior award is $47.7M is not a good fit — it means you would be competing against major research institutions. The scanner says so, in those words, instead of quietly scoring it as a match.

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Output

Every result is a ranked, CRM-ready record:

{
  "fitScore": 79,
  "band": "STRONG_FIT",
  "eligibility": "ELIGIBLE",
  "eligibilityReason": "Opportunity explicitly lists \"Small businesses\" (code 23) as an eligible applicant.",
  "daysUntilDeadline": 65,
  "title": "Advanced Development of Informatics Technologies for Cancer Research",
  "agency": "National Institutes of Health",
  "closeDate": "2026-10-18",
  "awardCeiling": null,
  "costSharingRequired": false,
  "cfdaNumbers": ["93.394"],
  "priorAwards": {
    "medianAward": 47701808,
    "sampleSize": 25,
    "topRecipients": ["..."]
  },
  "whyThisScore": [
    { "label": "Eligibility confirmed", "points": 25, "evidence": "..." },
    { "label": "Comfortable runway", "points": 20, "evidence": "65 days until close." },
    { "label": "Program is dominated by much larger awards", "points": 0, "evidence": "..." }
  ],
  "url": "https://www.grants.gov/search-results-detail/357305"
}

whyThisScore is the contract: no number appears without the fact that produced it.

Verdict bands

• STRONG_FIT (70+) — eligible, time to apply, well matched
• POSSIBLE_FIT (45–69) — worth a look, some friction
• REVIEW_ELIGIBILITY — you may qualify, but only prose can confirm it
• WEAK_FIT — eligible but poorly aligned

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Input

Field	Description
organizationType	Required. Nonprofit, small business, university, tribal, city/county/state, school district, housing authority, individual
focusKeywords	Your mission terms, e.g. ["housing", "youth"]
requestedAmount	What you need in USD — unlocks award-size fit and prior-winner comparison
canCostShare	If false, matching-fund requirements are penalized heavily
minDaysToApply	Your realistic prep time (default 14)
includeUnrestricted	Also return grants open to any entity (default true)
includeIneligible	Audit what got filtered out (default false)

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Who this is for

• Nonprofits without a $299/month grant-database subscription
• Small businesses hunting SBIR/STTR and agency funding
• Grant writers and consultants triaging opportunities across multiple clients
• Universities, tribal governments, municipalities, school districts, housing authorities
• Anyone who has wasted a week on a proposal they were never eligible to submit

Data sources

• Grants.gov Search API — all live federal funding opportunities
• USAspending.gov — reported federal award history

Both are official U.S. government APIs serving public data. No credentials, no scraping, no terms-of-service risk, and nothing to break when a site redesigns.

Notes and limits

• Covers federal opportunities on Grants.gov. Not state, local, or private foundation grants.
• NEEDS_REVIEW means exactly that — the announcement text decides. Read it.
• Prior-award data is matched by CFDA program number; programs with no award history report null rather than a fabricated benchmark.
• Eligibility here reflects entity type. Program-specific requirements (geography, certifications, registrations) still live in the announcement.

This tool narrows the field. It does not write the proposal or guarantee an award.