OsethBidReader

OsethBidReader is the automated reader Oseth uses to collect public bid notices from local government websites, such as city, county and special district "Bids" or "Purchasing" pages. We use what it finds to tell small businesses about open public contracts they could bid on, always with a link back to the buyer's own posting.

How to recognise it

Every request sends this User Agent:

OsethBidReader/1.0 (+https://oseth.io/bot.html; dev@oseth.io)

Requests are also signed with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures). They carry a Signature-Agent: "https://oseth.io" header, and our public key is published at https://oseth.io/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. A request that claims to be OsethBidReader without a valid signature is not from us.

What it reads

• Only public pages that list bids, requests for proposals and similar solicitations, and the detail page for each notice.
• Never pages behind a login, never forms, and it never submits anything.
• It does not collect personal information beyond what a buyer publishes on a public notice, such as the purchasing contact named on a solicitation.

The rules it follows

• It reads robots.txt before anything else and obeys Disallow and Crawl-delay.
• One request at a time per website, with a pause between requests, and at most one visit to a website per day.
• If a website answers 401, 403 or 429, or shows a human verification check, it stops and does not try another way in.
• It never hides what it is: no rotating proxies, no disguised browser identity, no solving of human checks.

How to limit or block it

Add this to your robots.txt to block it entirely:

User-agent: OsethBidReader
Disallow: /

Or slow it down, for example to one request a minute:

User-agent: OsethBidReader
Crawl-delay: 60

Changes take effect the next time it rereads your robots.txt, within a week.

Operator

OsethBidReader is operated by Oseth, the trading name of Flow State GTM, Inc., a corporation registered in Delaware, United States. The company was previously known as FlowStateGTM; its rebrand to Oseth is noted at flowstategtm.com.

Our Cloudflare verified bot submission for OsethBidReader is made from Oseth's own Cloudflare account (dev@oseth.io, account 443a403f40763a8492e07becd7f214e0, submission 01a1b32c-e89c-7832-85ee-3ca47ddb9ecb). The same details are published in a DNS TXT record at _cloudflare-botbase.oseth.io.

Contact

If it is causing you any trouble, or you would like us to read your bids from a feed or a different page, email dev@oseth.io. We answer every message.