cnsme / govbuy route × reality × statute
An MCP server · UK public procurement

The public-procurement co-pilot.

Ask your AI assistant how to buy a thing across the UK public sector, where to sell it as a vendor, or how public money flows as a researcher — and get a complete, source-anchored, decision-grade answer. Route × reality × statute, in one place.

claude mcp add --transport http govbuy https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp

Works with any MCP client — Claude, Claude Code, and the rest. Free & unauthenticated.

3,207frameworks & dynamic markets
117,829catalogue listings
658,625real awards fused in
£1.6tnof awarded contract value
Watch it work

Real questions, answered live

Buyers, sellers and researchers ask in plain English; govbuy answers from the live corpus. Every figure and chart in this demo is computed from govbuy_public at build time — 50 questions on rotation, always current, never scripted. Hover to pause · click a chip to jump.

govbuy · via your AI assistantlive
Researcher
Is the public sector overpaying for health & social work by buying through frameworks?
No — the framework median (£294k) sits 87% below open tender (£2.3m); open competition captures the mega-projects that pull its median up. 3,614 call-offs vs 15,089 open.
Median award · Health & social work
Framework call-off
£294k
Open tender
£2.3m
1 / 50 · answered from govbuy_public as of 2026-06-13
What it holds

Three layers no other tool welds together

01

Route

3,207 frameworks, DPS & dynamic markets across 185 operators — every lot, mechanic and document a compliant purchase needs — plus 117,829 catalogue listings of what suppliers actually sell, searchable by capability.

02

Reality

658,625 real tender awards joined on Companies House CRN: who actually wins the work, what buyers really pay, what's live, what's coming (866 planned procurements still ahead) and what's expiring.

Explore the data

Real numbers from the corpus — not a brochure

Every figure below is live from govbuy_public as of 2026-06-13 — the same data your assistant reasons over.

Method, plainly: figures are over award records (one per award×supplier line, 658,625 of them across 60,056 appointed-supplier edges) from the fused UK-Tenders corpus. Framework-ceiling outliers (>£100m) are removed so medians aren't distorted; the price explorer uses awards ≥£1,000. Totals are sums over award records and are not de-duplicated across multi-supplier awards, so they read as gross awarded value, not net spend. Reseller £ come from a curated reseller-graph join across every CPV a firm operates in. Dirty upstream dates are bounded by each chart's window. Counts of instrument/service are exact. Nothing here is hand-entered — re-run scripts/build-site.mjs to reproduce.

Interactive · pick a sector

Framework call-off vs open tender — what you really pay

The conventional wisdom is that frameworks save money. At the median they mostly don't — open tender captures the mega-projects, so its median sits higher in most sectors. The revealing exception is IT, where the call-off median runs above open: a real convenience premium on the routine middle of the market.

£1601bn mapped

How public money is awarded

Awarded spend by channel. Open tender dominates by value (the big programmes); framework & DPS call-offs are the high-volume routine layer.

Open tender
£1.0tn · 165,173
Other / unclassified
£334bn · 129,218
Framework call-off
£143bn · 114,313
Direct award
£43bn · 66,120
DPS call-off
£36bn · 19,699
The intermediary layer

£4.0bn flows through resellers

Thin-primes & VARs that carry other firms onto frameworks — the public buyer often never contracts who does the work.

Softcat thin-prime
£972m · 1,075
£775m · 510
CDW UK hybrid
£556m · 429
£410m · 286
£299m · 129
boxxe thin-prime
£260m · 409
XMA thin-prime
£222m · 272
£109m · 84
£107m · 28
Sortable · click a header

The frameworks that actually move money

Attributable call-off spend per framework (CRN-joined from real awards). Sort by spend, awards or supplier breadth.

#Framework Call-off £ ▾ Awards Suppliers
1 RM6100
£1.0bn 181 63
2 Construction Works and Associated Services (RM6088)
£769m 63 27
3 Technology Products & Associated Services (RM6068)
£627m 767 49
4 Media Services (RM6123)
£623m 31 9
5 Technology Products & Associated Services 2 (RM6098)
£574m 515 65
6 Supply of Energy and Ancillary Services (RM6011)
£425m 16 4
7 RM1056
£394m 20 6
8 RM3804
£368m 76 36
9 Digital Specialists and Programmes (RM6263)
£327m 35 18
10 Workforce Solutions (RM6288)
£320m 18 2
11 G-Cloud 14 (RM1557.13)
£282m 674 313
12 RM3830
£280m 15 7
£249bn re-procurement wave

Contracts expiring — the next 18 months

Every bar is real contract-end value. For buyers: re-procurement deadlines. For sellers: displacement windows.

Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
2027
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
117,829 listings · 6 catalogues

What's actually on the shelves

Per-listing descriptions across every public UK buying catalogue, searchable by capability — token-free re-crawled.

43,733
23,459
11,621
40
Ask it anything

Real questions, real answers

A sample of what people actually ask — across buyer, seller and researcher. Every answer is genuine claude -p output, source-anchored, with the URLs to verify.

Buyer

I'm a council. I need to host a containerised web app for ~£80k/year. Just tell me how to buy it.

buyG-Cloud 14 call-off, a ranked shortlist with real delivery records, the ~£183k IT median, alternative routes, and the PA2023 steps — one brief.

Buyer

A fire service needs drone thermal-imaging kit fast and compliantly — is a direct award allowed?

YPO Drones DPS 1148further competition only, no direct award; the Schedule 5 urgency route explained, with the Feb-2029 DPS sunset flagged.

Seller

I've built an AI triage tool but I'm on no framework. How do I get in front of the NHS this quarter?

Get admitted to an AI dynamic market (RM6200 / HealthTrust) — continuous joining; plus where NHS commissioners actually shop.

Seller

Find me an incumbent on a big contract that's expiring, and how to compete.

sell surfaces the displacement window — incumbents whose contracts are ending, value, end date, the route to re-bid.

Seller

I rent out goats that clear invasive scrub. How do I sell conservation grazing to the public sector?

An honest answer: no grazing framework exists; the money flows via grounds-maintenance primes — subcontract, and chase sub-threshold local notices.

Researcher

Is the public sector overpaying by buying IT through framework call-offs instead of open competition?

In IT the median call-off (£183k) runs above open tender (£140k) — a ~31% convenience premium; every other sector inverts.

Researcher

Map the 'thin-prime' economy — who fronts other firms onto public frameworks, and how much flows there?

£4.0bn of call-off spend traced to the reseller layer — Softcat, Phoenix, CDW, Bramble Hub

Researcher

Which 'live' tech frameworks are dead paper — appointed suppliers but no real spend?

It tells you what it can prove and what it can't — separating genuinely-idle frameworks from attribution gaps.

5 verbs, 3 personas

Ask the way you think — buy, sell, research

Buyer

  • buyone opinionated brief: route + PA2023 mechanic + ranked shortlist (track record + exclusion) + price + alternative routes + compliance checklist
  • supplieris this firm safe? a two-limb live exclusion check + its full framework footprint + CRN-matched delivery record
  • frameworkone instrument: lots, appointed + observed-from-awards suppliers, coverage, and the PA2023-precise call-off path

Seller

  • sellyour route to market: frameworks & live DPS you can join, ranked by REAL call-off spend, live + forward opportunities, incumbents to displace, and resellers who can carry you in

Researcher

  • researchthe power surface: read-only BigQuery SQL over the whole corpus, a spend & competition x-ray by CPV, or the schema / freshness & coverage
Connect it

Set it up in your assistant — in a minute

govbuy is a remote Model-Context-Protocol server at https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp — streamable HTTP, free, unauthenticated, no API key. Add the URL to any MCP-capable client and the five verbs appear. Recipes (current as of 2026-06-13 — each links its official docs):

Claude Code

Terminal — one command
claude mcp add --transport http govbuy https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp
Then ask Claude anything about UK procurement.Docs →

Claude Desktop

Settings → Developer → Edit Config
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "govbuy": { "type": "http", "url": "https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp" }
  }
}
Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart.Docs →

GitHub Copilot (VS Code)

Create .vscode/mcp.json (or ⌘⇧P → “MCP: Add Server”)
{
  "servers": {
    "govbuy": { "type": "http", "url": "https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp" }
  }
}
Use in Copilot Chat → Agent mode.Docs →

Gemini CLI

Edit ~/.gemini/settings.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "govbuy": { "httpUrl": "https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp" }
  }
}
Gemini uses httpUrl for streamable-HTTP servers.Docs →

Cursor

Edit ~/.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "govbuy": { "url": "https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp" }
  }
}
Or Settings → MCP → Add new server.Docs →

Any MCP client

Windsurf, Zed, Cline, LibreChat, n8n…
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "govbuy": { "type": "http", "url": "https://govbuy.run.cns.me/mcp" }
  }
}
Point any Model-Context-Protocol client at the URL.Docs →
The honest part

What it can't do — and says so

Credibility is in the candour. govbuy never fabricates: every supplier, framework and £ comes from a source that literally states it, behind a verbatim-substring gate.

  • No published supplier list. 684 of 3,108 live frameworks publish no member list (login-walled portals, or DPS/neutral-vendor models that don't publish membership) — govbuy says so rather than guessing.
  • Attribution gaps. Most awards carry no framework reference, so a flagship showing low spend is often an attribution gap, not dead paper — and it tells you which.
  • Backfilled, labelled. Where an official list is missing, 3,910 supplier×framework edges are inferred from real awards — clearly marked observed-not-official.
  • Not legal advice. It documents routes; it doesn't assemble the purchase or sign off compliance. Confirm on the official source it links.
🦩
Built by cns.me

If this is the kind of thing you need built — let's talk.

govbuy is one example of how cns.me turns a messy, high-stakes domain into something an AI can reason over precisely. Strategy, data, and the engineering to make it real.