A human bid writer charges £500 to £2,000 per submission for a UK cleaning tender. SwiftBid's per-bid AI sits at £149 to £749 depending on tier. mytender.io and AutogenAI sell subscriptions for whole bid teams. CleanTender bundles unlimited drafts with qualification scoring and a tender feed for £99/mo.
At what bid volume does each option win? When does the human still earn the fee? Honest maths for UK cleaning and FM SMEs choosing between hand-written, AI, or hybrid.
- Human bid writers: £500 to £2,000 per submission. Best for high-stakes one-offs where the buyer wants a custom narrative tied to named past projects.
- Manual bid services like Complete Tenders sell done-for-you submissions at the upper end of the human-writer pricing band.
- mytender.io: subscription AI built for work-winning teams. RAG over your past bids, content libraries, integrations with SharePoint and Salesforce. Pricing varies, check direct.
- SwiftBid: per-bid AI at £149 (Basic), £349 (Standard), £749 (Premium). Premium includes optional human review. Sector-agnostic, fast turnaround.
- AutogenAI: enterprise proposal-writing platform aligned with the Procurement Act 2023. Built for large bid teams. Priced accordingly.
- CleanTender: cleaning + FM specialist. £99/mo for unlimited drafts plus qualification scoring plus tender feed. Compliance vocabulary baked into the prompts.
What's in this comparison¶
- When a human bid writer earns the fee
- Manual bid services (Complete Tenders, freelance)
- mytender.io
- SwiftBid
- AutogenAI
- CleanTender
- The maths: which wins at which volume
- Verdict + what to do this quarter
When a human bid writer earns the fee¶
Human bid writers earn their per-submission fee when the bid is high-stakes, sector-specific, and demands a custom narrative tied to named past projects with verifiable references. A £400k 5-year council-wide cleaning bid where the buyer's evaluation team wants to read about your six previous similar contracts in detail is the right job for a human writer.
Where humans lose value: routine bids that ask the same SQ questions in slightly different orders. The TUPE answer doesn't change. The Social Value TOMs commitments don't change. The COSHH plan doesn't change. Paying £1,000 a submission to have a human paste your existing answers into a new template is the wrong fit.
If your last bid writer's draft was 80% identical to the previous one, you're paying for a copy-paste. AI does copy-paste at a fraction of the cost.
Pro tip
Manual bid services¶
Complete Tenders (completetenders.com, services side) and freelance UK bid writers sit in this category. Pricing typically £500 to £2,000 per submission. Quality varies by writer.
Strong on the largest bids. Weak on volume. If you're submitting 4 to 8 bids a year, paying a human £1,000 each time is £4,000 to £8,000 a year for work that's increasingly templated.
mytender.io¶
mytender.io. UK-focused AI bid-writing platform. Uploads tender documents, shreds requirements via retrieval-augmented generation, and drafts responses against a knowledge base of your past bids. Pitches "first drafts in minutes, not days" with SharePoint, Salesforce, and Google Drive integrations.
Built around content libraries and team collaboration. Best fit: a bid team running 10+ submissions a year who already have a substantial bank of past bids to feed the RAG system. Pricing varies, check direct.
Sector-agnostic. The platform doesn't know what BICSc or BS EN 1276 is unless you've put it in your knowledge base. For a small cleaning firm without a content library to upload, that's a long ramp before the first useful draft.
SwiftBid¶
swiftbid.co.uk. Per-bid AI bid-writing service. Three tiers: Basic at £149, Standard at £349, Premium at £749. Premium adds optional human expert review. Compliance audit, multi-document analysis, and turnarounds as fast as 6 hours at the top tier.
Best fit: a firm doing 1 to 4 bids a year that doesn't want a subscription commitment. The per-bid model means you only pay when you're actually bidding.
Sector-agnostic, like mytender.io. The Premium tier's human review can patch some sector gaps but you're paying enterprise consultancy rates inside an AI-tool wrapper at that point.
AutogenAI¶
autogenai.com. Enterprise proposal-writing platform used on UK public-sector bids. RAG-based system that ingests organisation knowledge, storyboards responses, drafts content, and runs automated compliance and quality review. Explicitly markets alignment with the Procurement Act 2023 and the National Procurement Policy Statement.
Built for large bid teams. The pricing reflects the audience and the platform assumes you have a head of work-winning, multiple bid managers, and a content library worth shredding into the RAG system.
For a 5 to 50 person UK cleaning firm, AutogenAI is overkill. The features earn their fee at a scale most cleaning SMEs aren't operating at. Worth knowing as the enterprise reference point but not the right tool for the audience this comparison is written for.
CleanTender¶
Cleaning + FM specialist. £99/mo or £990/yr on Pro. Bundles three things that the alert and bid-writing platforms split.
- Tender discovery. Live UK cleaning + FM tenders pulled from the official OCDS feed.
- Qualification scan. Reads the contract pack and scores your stored 30+ field profile against it in under 30 seconds. Returns a 0-100 score, structured compliance gaps with severity and fix hints, plus a submission checklist.
- Bid drafting. Selection Questionnaire response in the standard sections (Company Overview, Relevant Experience, Quality Assurance, Staff Training and BICSc, COSHH Management, Social Value and TOMs). Unlimited drafts on Pro.
Compliance vocabulary baked into the prompts: BICSc, NHS National Specifications for Cleanliness, COSHH, TUPE, Enhanced DBS, ISO 9001/14001/45001, Social Value Act TOMs framework (5 themes, 28 outcomes, 147 measures), Procurement Act 2023, BS EN 1276 and EN 14476, PAS 91 (legacy)/SQ/CAS. The drafts know what public buyers score on. Sector-agnostic AI tools don't.
The maths: which wins at which volume¶
Annual cost by bid volume. Assume £1,000 per human submission as the median for the human row.
| Bid volume / yr | Human writer | SwiftBid Standard | mytender.io | CleanTender Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 bid | £1,000 | £349 | Subscription overhead | £990 |
| 4 bids | £4,000 | £1,396 | Subscription | £990 |
| 8 bids | £8,000 | £2,792 | Subscription | £990 |
| 12 bids | £12,000 | £4,188 | Subscription | £990 |
| 20 bids | £20,000 | £6,980 | Subscription | £990 |
Annual cost comparison. CleanTender pricing is £99/mo or £990/yr (annual deal saves two months).
CleanTender's flat £990/yr beats every per-bid option from 2 bids onward. SwiftBid's per-bid model wins for 1-bid-a-year operations that don't need a subscription. Human writers stay relevant for very-large one-offs only.
Count last year's bids. If it's 4 or more, every per-submission writer or per-bid AI tool costs more than a year of CleanTender. The maths only flips if you're below 2 bids a year.
Pro tip
What about quality?¶
Quality is the right second question after price. The honest answer: a human bid writer with deep cleaning-sector experience produces a tighter narrative on a one-off than any AI tool. A generalist human bid writer produces a draft that's about as good as a sector-tuned AI tool, and worse than a sector-tuned AI tool when the buyer scores on cleaning-specific compliance vocabulary.
The right hybrid for medium-volume bidders: AI tool for the routine sections (compliance, policies, QA, social value), human review for the contract-specific narrative paragraphs. CleanTender's draft output gives a human reviewer something close to ready-to-submit; from there a 30-minute polish gets the submission to the line. Total time and cost beat either pure-human or pure-AI alone.
Verdict + what to do this quarter¶
- Under 2 bids a year. SwiftBid Basic or Standard at £149 to £349 per bid. No subscription. Pay only when you bid.
- 2 to 12 bids a year (most UK cleaning SMEs). CleanTender Pro at £99/mo or £990/yr. Drops the per-submission cost to £83 to £499 effective per bid, and bundles qualification scoring and tender discovery on top.
- 12+ bids a year with a dedicated bid manager. mytender.io subscription on the AI side, plus a human reviewer for the largest one-offs. Skip AutogenAI unless your team is already at enterprise scale.
If you're at the SSIP-shopping stage rather than the bid-tool-shopping stage, the comparison you want is CHAS vs SMAS Worksafe. For the full picture across every layer of the bid stack, see the best UK tender platforms and bid tools roundup.
Sources
- Procurement Act 2023 · Framework AutogenAI explicitly markets alignment with
- Procurement Policy Notes (Cabinet Office) · PPN 03/23 (SQ replacement for PAS 91)
FAQs
Frequently asked questions
- Depends on the bid. For routine UK public-sector cleaning bids that ask the same SQ questions in slightly different orders, a sector-tuned AI tool produces drafts that score about as well as a generalist human bid writer's output, and faster. For high-stakes one-offs where the buyer wants a custom narrative tied to named past projects, a human bid writer with cleaning-sector experience still wins. The hybrid approach (AI draft, human polish) covers most cases for medium-volume bidders.
- £500 to £2,000 per submission is the typical range for a UK public-sector cleaning bid. Lower end for short SQ-only responses on small council notices, upper end for full ITT submissions on multi-site contracts. Above £2,000 you're paying enterprise bid-consultancy rates that don't usually map to the SME market.
- Different shapes. SwiftBid is per-bid (£149 to £749) and works for 1 to 4 bids a year with no subscription. mytender.io is a subscription platform built for work-winning teams running 10+ bids a year with a content library to feed the RAG system. SwiftBid wins on the low-volume end. mytender.io wins on the high-volume end. For 4 to 12 bids a year the per-bid maths makes a flat-rate subscription tool like CleanTender (£990/yr) cheaper than either.
- Technically yes, in practice no. AutogenAI is built for large bid teams with multiple bid managers and a content library worth shredding into the RAG system. The pricing reflects that audience. A 5 to 50 person UK cleaning firm will over-pay and under-use the platform. The Procurement Act 2023 alignment messaging is genuinely useful, but it's accessible at far lower price points through other tools.
- Because writing a bid you can't win is the most expensive mistake a UK cleaning SME makes. The qualification scan in CleanTender reads the contract pack and scores your stored 30+ field profile against it in 30 seconds before you commit a weekend to drafting. Below 60, walk. Between 60 and 80, read carefully. Above 80, write. The scan and the draft work from the same profile data, so the draft reflects the real compliance position rather than aspirational claims.
- Free saved-search alerts on Contracts Finder and Find a Tender Service (£0), plus CHAS Standard or SMAS Worksafe SSIP for the pre-qualification gate (£345 to £600 a year), plus CleanTender Pro for tender filtering, qualification scoring, and unlimited Selection Questionnaire drafts (£990 a year). Total around £1,400 to £1,600 a year for the whole stack. Most cleaning contract wins repay it on a single bid.