Data policy
Data policy
Effective [[EFFECTIVE DATE]] · Companion to the privacy policy
The privacy policy covers your data. This one covers the contract data: where it comes from, how current it is, how far you should trust it, and what happens to everything if you leave.
The one thing that matters. Prime Connect is a convenience layer over public government systems. It is not the system of record. Before you commit to a bid, open the solicitation on SAM.gov or DIBBS and read it there. Every card in Prime Connect links straight to the original for exactly that reason.
1. Where the data comes from
| Source | What we take | Method |
|---|---|---|
| SAM.gov Contract Opportunities |
Notices matching your NAICS codes: title, solicitation number, type, set-aside, agency, posted date, response deadline, and award details where published | Official public API, one request per NAICS code per refresh, using your own API key |
| DLA DIBBS Defense Logistics Agency |
RFQ line items: solicitation, NSN, supply class, purchase request number, quantity, unit of issue, return-by date, and the RFQ document link | The fixed-width daily index files DLA publishes for this purpose, after accepting the standard Department of Defense consent banner |
| USAspending.gov | Past award records: recipient, amount, awarding agency, period of performance, description | Official public API, queried live when you search. Nothing is cached |
We do not scrape the DIBBS web interface. That interface paginates through ASP.NET postbacks and breaks whenever DLA restyles it; the published index files are the same data, offered for machine reading.
2. How fresh it is, honestly
- Scheduled refresh runs at 07:00 Eastern daily.
- Opening the board triggers a background refresh only if the cache is more than 30 minutes old. You always see cached data immediately.
- The Refresh button forces a pull, limited to three per ten minutes for the whole workspace.
- DLA publishes once per business day. There is no file on weekends or federal holidays; Prime Connect looks back up to four days for the most recent one.
- USAspending is live on every search, never cached.
The header always states when the data was last successfully refreshed. If a source is failing or your SAM.gov quota is exhausted, the board says so plainly rather than showing you stale data as though it were current.
The SAM.gov quota, specifically
SAM.gov limits API keys to as few as 10 requests per day for non-entity-registered accounts, or 1,000 for entity-registered ones. This is why Prime Connect caches aggressively and never calls SAM.gov when you load a page. If the quota is exhausted, cached data keeps serving, a notice explains why, and automatic retries pause for six hours. Registering your entity on SAM.gov is the fix.
3. What we do not claim
We would rather set this out plainly than bury it in a disclaimer.
- Not complete. Prime Connect reads three sources. It does not cover state, local, education, GSA eBuy, grants, or subcontracting portals. If a notice is posted somewhere we do not read, you will not see it here.
- Only your categories. You see notices for the NAICS codes and supply classes you configured. Anything outside them is not fetched.
- As good as the source. If an agency posts a notice with the wrong NAICS code, a typo in the quantity, or an incorrect deadline, Prime Connect faithfully shows you the wrong thing. We do not clean or second-guess government data.
- No relevance scoring. Nothing is ranked by a model. Ordering is by deadline or posting date, and filtering is what you set.
- Not legal or bidding advice. Eligibility, set-aside qualification and compliance are yours to determine.
4. Government data and your rights to it
The contract data in Prime Connect is United States federal government information, published publicly by SAM.gov, the Defense Logistics Agency and USAspending.gov. Works of the federal government are generally not subject to copyright in the United States. We claim no ownership over it and place no restriction on your use of it.
What we do claim is the arrangement, parsing and presentation — the software. See the terms.
Prime Connect is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a product of SAM.gov, the Defense Logistics Agency, USAspending.gov, the Department of Defense, or any other United States government agency. Use of those systems remains subject to their own terms, including the Department of Defense consent banner presented by DIBBS.
5. Your data, and who owns it
Your saved bids, notes, pricing figures, settings and account details are yours. We store and process them to run the service and for nothing else. We do not aggregate them, anonymise them for resale, benchmark you against other customers, or use them to train anything.
Your pricing figures deserve a specific mention: the cost and bid price you type into the margin calculator are commercially sensitive. They are stored in your workspace database, visible to your workspace, and never transmitted anywhere else — not to SAM.gov, not to DLA, not to us for analysis.
6. Where it lives
One SQLite database file on [[HOSTING REGION]], on an encrypted volume. All processing happens in the United States.
Prime Connect is single-tenant: your workspace is its own deployment with its own database file. Your data is not commingled with another customer’s, because there is no shared table for it to be commingled in.
7. Subprocessors
| Who | What for | What they can see |
|---|---|---|
| [[HOSTING PROVIDER]] | Application hosting and storage | The encrypted volume holding the database |
That is the entire list. There is no analytics provider, no error-tracking service, no customer-messaging widget, no email provider, and no advertising network, because Prime Connect does not use any of them.
The three government APIs are not subprocessors — they receive queries, not your personal data. We will update this table before adding anyone, and notify workspace administrators.
8. Getting your data out
The saved list, including notes and margin figures, exports to CSV from the product at any time, with no request needed. For a complete copy of your workspace database, write to [[CONTACT EMAIL]] and we will provide the SQLite file within 30 days.
9. Deletion
You can delete individual saved bids, notes and accounts yourself at any time. To close a workspace entirely, write to [[CONTACT EMAIL]]. We delete the database, including your stored SAM.gov API key, within 30 days, and it falls out of backups within a further 30. You should separately rotate that key at SAM.gov.
10. Backups
The database is backed up on a rolling basis and backups are retained for 30 days, then overwritten. Backups are encrypted at rest and held in the same region as the live data. They exist so a failed disk does not cost you your saved bids.
Questions about anything on this page: [[CONTACT EMAIL]]