Data & privacy
What we aggregate, and what we never touch.
RFP Free holds confidential search intentions for institutions with a fiduciary duty. Here is exactly how that information is handled, in plain language.
Confidential by construction
Draft searches never leave your organization. While a search is a draft, no page, no link, and no export shows it to anyone outside your organization.
Responses stay sealed until your deadline. Your committee cannot read any submission until the response deadline passes, and that is measured against our server clock, not a value your browser could change.
What you share during intake is never shown to firms. What you tell the intake interview to shape the RFP is for drafting only. It is not exposed to responders under any circumstance.
Contact information stays inside the RFP. Individuals invited to participate see no contact information beyond what the RFP itself discloses. Firms see only the contact details your organization chose to include; your committee sees only what a firm put in its response.
What is aggregated, and the floor that protects it
Over time, normalized figures such as fee structures may feed de-identified, aggregate benchmarks: the kind of market context that helps everyone price and evaluate more fairly. Aggregation is governed by a hard rule: no benchmark is ever published unless it draws on enough independent submissions that no single firm or organization can be identified from it, and no cut is shown where one firm dominates the sample. Below that floor, nothing is published at all.
What is never aggregated
- The identity of an organization that has withheld it
- Any individual submission, attributable to its firm
- The contents of a search that has not been sent out
- Anything from an organization or firm that has opted a submission out
Your data, on request
Organizations and firms can request an export or deletion of their data. Some records tied to a completed transaction or a fiduciary audit trail are retained where a decision has already been made in reliance on them; those exclusions are documented. The full policy is published at our privacy page and updated as the product develops.
RFP Free is not a public procurement system. Some hospital systems and public universities have statutory notice, confidentiality, or open-records obligations. We do not claim compliance with them. Organizations subject to formal procurement rules should confirm their approach with counsel.