Should we go federal, and what will it cost?
The decision usually gets made from a board member’s contact, one inbound solicitation, and an estimate written by somebody who sells the remedy. A large part of it is already answerable from the public federal record: what your company looks like to a government buyer today, which of the gaps between you and a credible bid are forms and which are engineering quarters, and where the money actually goes in the first year.
A six-figure commitment argued from anecdote.
None of this is a failure of diligence. It is what happens when the only people who can price the federal question are the ones selling the answer to it.
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The trigger is inbound, and it is one data point
An agency asks whether you sell on a schedule, or a prime asks for a quote on a subcontract. One request looks like a market. It is not evidence about the market, and it usually arrives with a response window too short to go and find out.
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The estimate comes from the vendor of the cure
Authorization advisors scope authorization work. Capture consultants scope capture. Each number is competent inside its own boundary and none of them is the whole budget, so the board hears three quotes and approves none of them.
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The plan is built in months and lands in fiscal years
Agencies buy on appropriations, option years and recompete cycles that have no interest in your sales calendar. A twelve-month plan generally discovers this in month nine, at which point the spend has happened and the pipeline has not.
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Nobody has read what the government already publishes about you
Your registration status, your engagement footprint, the vehicles that could reach your buyer, and the compliance signals anyone can look up — all public, and almost none of it in the deck the decision gets made from.
One number, and the twelve answers underneath it.
The Federal Readiness Score is a 100-point diagnostic built from public federal data — 62 lenses, grouped into 12 categories. For an executive the number is the summary and the categories are the deliverable, because they separate the two kinds of gap a budget has to treat completely differently.
A structural gap is the absence of something a buyer can look up: a registration that is not current, no presence on a vehicle the agency actually buys through, no public engagement history in the category you sell into. Those are measured in forms, weeks and partners. A capability gap is measured in engineering quarters — the security posture your architecture has to reach, and the assessment path a contract will put you on.
That line is most of the answer to “what will it cost”. Two companies can hold the same score and face budgets an order of magnitude apart, depending entirely on which side of it their missing points sit.
The full category list, what each one reads, and what the score never claims are on the methodology page.
- Where you stand before you spend anything
- Search your own company and read the score first. Everything behind it is public, which means a contracting officer or a prime can read the same page without telling you they did.
- Which gaps are forms and which are quarters
- The category breakdown says whether the shortest path to a credible bid runs through paperwork, through a partner, or through your own roadmap — which is the difference between a budget line and a hiring plan.
- Who is already serving your buyer
- The same public record covers the vendors an agency currently engages in your industry code: the agency mix behind their footprint, how large it is, and whether it is recent or trailing off.
- What an empty category actually means
- A category with nothing in it is the absence of a public record, not a bad grade with a story attached. On a first federal pass most of them are empty; knowing which ones is how the plan gets sequenced.
Your compliance claims, read the way a buyer reads them.
Every vendor page carries a compliance overlay, and it renders a government-published record and a company’s own statement as two different things, because they are two different things. Before you budget for authorization work it is worth seeing which of your own claims currently carries a source.
- FedRAMP
A listing we found in a government-published register, shown with the date we observed it. This is the only one of the three states that survives somebody else checking.
- SOC 2
Your own statement, rendered as your own statement — outlined, and never with a check beside it. It is not worthless. It is just not evidence, and a federal buyer will treat it about the way this badge does.
- CMMC
No public signal either way. Mandatory third-party certification was suspended on 13 July 2026 with no replacement date, so this is the state most software vendors are in and it is not a finding against you.
If your public posture is all middle badge, that is a real line in the budget — and one you can size from this page rather than from a proposal you are already committed to.
The diagnostic is the cheap part.
Searching any vendor, your own company included, is free and needs no login. For most executives that is the version of this question worth answering first, and it costs an afternoon.
When the question turns into a project, the Team plan is $499 a month, or $4,990 a year: your own full readiness report, watchlists on the vendors you are measuring yourself against, and an export for whoever is building the model. Access is arranged by email today rather than by self-serve checkout — write to hello@govexpress.ai.
Both figures are published in full on the pricing page, and the contract terms restate them. You do not have to take a call to find out what a plan costs.
Start with your own company.
Search is free and needs no account. Read your score, read the category breakdown, and see what a prime or a contracting officer would find if they looked you up this afternoon.
Take the compliance question with you
Six pages on the cost line executives most often get wrong: what the 13 July 2026 suspension of mandatory certification paused, what DFARS 252.204-7012 still requires regardless, and why the scoping decision — not the control list — sets the price of everything after it.
Rather not give up an address? Read the free explainer →