Where 40–60 hours per bid actually goes
A practitioner put it at 40 to 60 hours for one or two submissions, unprompted, and nobody in the thread argued. The interesting part is the breakdown: writing is not the biggest line, and the biggest lines are the mechanical ones.
Reading the package: 8 to 16 hours
A 100 to 200 page solicitation, plus attachments, plus amendments. Read once to understand it, again to extract requirements, and a third time when an amendment lands and you need to know what changed. This is the line that scales worst with the number of bids and the one a machine reads without getting bored on page 90.
Deciding whether to bid: 2 to 8 hours, or zero
Either you research the award history, the incumbent and the price the government has been paying — or you skip it and decide on instinct. Most small firms skip it, because it is a couple of hours of unpaid research per opportunity and there are forty opportunities. Skipping it is how firms end up bidding the ones that were never winnable.
Assembling your own material: 6 to 12 hours
Finding the right past performance, the current rates, the insurance certificate, the CPARS narrative, the certifications, and the version of the capability statement that matches this requirement. Every hour of this is an hour spent on material you already own, which is why it is infuriating and why it is automatable.
Writing: 10 to 20 hours
The part everybody means when they say "writing a proposal", and roughly a third of the total. It is also the part where your judgment shows and where an unedited draft loses — so it is the last place to cut corners and the first place people try to.
Compliance and formatting: 4 to 10 hours
Building the matrix, checking page limits, formats, volume structure, and that every requirement in Sections L and M has an answer somewhere. Mechanical, unforgiving, and the reason compliant-but-mediocre proposals beat brilliant-but-non-compliant ones.
Submission: 1 to 4 hours, and all the risk
Assembling volumes, verifying the recipient against Section L, the subject line, the reply-to, the attachments, the clock. A tiny share of the hours and nearly all of the catastrophic risk, because everything above is worth nothing if this goes to the wrong mailbox at 4:55pm.
What this says about where software helps
If writing were the bottleneck, a better writer would fix bidding. It is not. Reading, deciding, assembling and checking are two-thirds of the time, and they are the parts that reward memory, a schedule and mechanical verification rather than eloquence. That is the whole reason we built an agent rather than a better editor.
The product this comes from
An AI that works your federal bids
Reads every attachment, scores against the award record, drafts from your past performance, and stops at a gate it cannot pass without your click.
$350/mo · 10 generations · no card
More posts
- Why we compare ourselves to $25,000 platforms →
- Can ChatGPT write a federal proposal? →
- How to tell a solicitation is wired for the incumbent →
Looking for reference rather than argument? Learn has the plain answers.
Questions on this
Stop reading and run it on a live solicitation.
$350/month, 10 proposal generations. The trial reads, scores and drafts everything — submitting and exporting are the paid part.