About TenderCodes

TenderCodes is a reference for the EU procurement vocabulary. It explains what each CPV code covers, who tends to use it, and where the buying actually happens. One person runs the site. It is opinionated where the official tree picks the wrong code, and quiet where buyers and suppliers reasonably disagree.

Why this site

EU procurement publishes thousands of contracts a week, but the codes that index them are dense, inconsistent in places, and easy to misread. Most people who need this information are suppliers trying to find the right work, or buyers trying to spec out a tender that will attract the right bidders.

The references that already exist cluster at two extremes. The official portals like SIMAP and op.europa.eu are complete and almost unreadable for anyone who is not already deep in the bureaucracy. The commercial overlays bury what is otherwise public data behind sign-up walls and a heavy layer of marketing copy.

Neither serves a small IT shop deciding whether to bid on a 600k framework, or a procurement officer trying to pick between 72212000 and 72415000 for a customer-portal contract. This site started because the existing references did not help me as a bidder.

What is on the site

The 9,454 active CPV codes each have a page with the official EU title, the place in the hierarchy, links to adjacent codes, and any tenders currently open under it from TED.

About 300 codes in the IT and software family are fully documented. Those pages add a plain-English summary, separate sections for buyers and suppliers, the codes most often confused with this one, and a few real example tender titles with year, country, and award value.

Search comes in two shapes: a keyword box if you know roughly what you are looking for, and a semantic "describe what you build" search across an embedding of every code in all seven supported languages. You can subscribe to alerts on any code, documented or not, with one-click unsubscribe.

Guides ship soon. None yet. Hand-written long-form articles on EU IT procurement, common code-picking mistakes, and what suppliers wish buyers knew.

Site chrome is in English at launch. German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch fall back to English until per-locale chrome is reviewed. CPV titles themselves are translated into all 24 EU languages by the EU.

Editorial policy

Some of what you read on a fully documented code page was drafted by a language model and reviewed by a human before publication. Specifically: the plain-English "what this code covers" summary, the perspective sections for contracting authorities and suppliers, the "commonly confused with" suggestions, and the industries-and-typical-projects list. Drafts come from Anthropic's Sonnet 4.6, with Opus 4.7 on borderline codes. Every draft lands in an admin review queue, gets diffed against the previous published version, runs through quality checks (word counts, banned-phrase list, internal-term leak detection, similarity against sibling codes), and is approved or rejected by a human before going live.

What is not model-assisted: this About page, the legal pages (privacy, imprint, cookies), the voice and lexicon discipline that runs across the site, the long-form guides when they ship, and any opinion-bearing sentence anywhere on the site. Editor's notes on documented code pages are written by hand, never generated.

What is mechanical: site chrome translations come from authoritative EU vocabulary sources, the structured-data markup is generated from the same data the page renders, and the CPV hierarchy itself comes directly from the EU Publications Office's CPV XML.

Every draft, including ones that never publish, is kept in the database with a model name, prompt version, and timestamp. Retiring a published page is reversible: the page falls back to the un-documented layout, the previous version stays in the history.

Errors reach me at [email protected]. I reply within 30 days, usually faster.

About BrotCode

BrotCode is a Berlin-based software company that builds the systems German SMBs and EU businesses actually run on, not the ones agencies pitch. Custom software, multi-tenant SaaS, mobile apps, document-classification and retrieval-augmented AI workflows that ship instead of demo, plus the DevOps to keep all of it alive after handover. Past work includes insurance, BaFin-touched finance, and the kind of internal-tooling cleanup nobody writes case studies about.

If you have a codebase the previous team left in a tangled state, a multi-tenant SaaS that needs real tenant isolation before you scale past 200 customers, or an AI workflow you have prototyped but cannot ship into production with audit trails, BrotCode picks up that work.