Samgov MCP server

SAM.gov — Federal Procurement and Entity Registration

The U.S. General Services Administration's System for Award Management. The authoritative source for federal contract opportunities, entity (vendor) registrations, set-aside designations, exclusion records (debarments), and assistance listings. Required reading for anyone selling to the federal government.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

Three distinct surfaces:

1. Contract opportunities (RFPs, RFQs, sources sought, etc.) — what the federal government is currently buying. → samsearchopportunities({keyword}). For one specific solicitation: samgetopportunity({solicitation_number}).

2. Entity records — registered vendors with CAGE codes, UEIs, NAICS codes, certifications. → samentitysearch({business_name}).

3. Set-aside opportunities — small business, veteran-owned, women-owned, HUBZone, etc. → samsetasideopportunities({setaside}).

Pair with USAspending (post-award contract data) and the govconcontractorprofile compound for full agent flows.

Auth

SAM.gov requires a free API key from https://sam.gov/data-services. Pass via apiKey. The shared PLATFORMSAMKEY the gateway falls back to when a caller supplies none is a personal-tier key with a hard 10-request DAILY quota — measured live 2026-09-01: it answered exactly ten calls and returned 900804 Message throttled out for the rest of the UTC day, with nextAccessTime set to the next midnight UTC. See the mirror note below for why samsearchopportunities mostly doesn't need it anymore. Entity search and exclusion search no longer need a key either (migration 135): both answer from local snapshots of SAM.gov's public Entity Registration and Exclusions extracts. Verified live 2026-09-13 with no key supplied — samentitysearch returned Lockheed Martin from an 889,932-row mirror and samsearchexclusions answered from a 168,462-row one. Only samgetopportunity and samsetasideopportunities still hit the live, key-gated API on every call; samentitysearch also does when you pass live:true.

A key of your own is worth bringing. GSA sets the quota by what the ACCOUNT carries, not by what you pay: a non-federal personal key with no SAM.gov role gets 10/day (that is the tier the shared key sits on), the same key gets 1,000/day once the account carries a role, and a non-federal system account also gets 1,000/day — all free (). So passing _apiKey is not a workaround for a Pipeworx limit, it is a 100x larger allowance for a profile change.

When the shared key is spent, these tools do not return a bare upstream error: they say the quota is a daily one, quote the exact reset instant SAM.gov reported, and name both remedies (apiKey, or samsearch_opportunities, which answers keyword searches with no key at all). A daily quota cannot be retried out of, and an agent that is not told so will keep trying.

Data mirror (fleet #343)

samsearchopportunities reads a Supabase mirror first, before ever spending the shared API key: SAM.gov publishes the entire Contract Opportunities list as a public daily CSV extract, no key and no rate limit — (the same falextracts bucket linked from SAM.gov's own Data Services page). A GitHub Actions job (scripts/samgov-upsert.sh, schedule in .github/workflows/samgov-refresh.yml) loads it into samgov_opportunities daily.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.