Pricing
Every federal 8(a) set-aside and sole-source notice posted to SAM.gov, collected, checked, and written up every week.
The certification is worth real money and a nine-year clock is running against it. Finding out what posted this week should not cost you the hours you need for bidding.
What it costs
$390 a year. Two months free against the monthly rate.
$39 a month, if you would rather pay that way.
Subscribe at this rate and it stays yours for as long as you stay subscribed.
What is in each tier
| In every issue | Free | Member |
|---|---|---|
| This Week in 8(a), the policy decoder | Yes | Yes |
| By the Numbers | Yes | Yes |
| The deadlines closing soonest | Top three | All of them |
| Act Now: Sources Sought, with what to send on each | No | Yes |
| Sole-Source Watch, with the honest read on each notice | No | Yes |
| New This Week, every listing by industry | No | Yes |
| Closing in the Next Two Weeks, the full table | No | Yes |
| Back issues | No | Yes |
The free tier is a real tier, not a teaser. It carries the policy reading and the numbers every week, permanently, at no cost.
What you are actually paying for
Any owner can paste a notice into a chatbot and get plain English back. That is not what this is.
Fewer bad ones. You do not need more listings. Every week the issue cuts everything posted down to the opportunities you can act on, so finding the two that matter stops costing you an evening of opening fifty.
Remembering to look. Checking SAM.gov every week, forever, is the work. Most firms mean to and then a proposal deadline eats the week. The issue arrives whether or not you remembered.
Completeness. Several hundred notices post in a typical week and the 8(a) ones are a small fraction of them. Every one of that fraction is in the issue. A search you run yourself returns whatever it happens to find, with nothing telling you what it missed.
Facts you can act on. Nothing in an issue is invented. Deadlines, NAICS codes, agency names, and contracting officer details are copied from the record, never paraphrased, and where a notice does not say something the issue says so instead of guessing. A wrong deadline costs real bid hours.
How it compares
Priced against the tools 8(a) firms actually use for this, rather than against general business reading, it sits below every paid option in the category. The platforms that cover federal contracting more broadly run from roughly $500 a year into the thousands, and they hand you a search box. This hands you the week, already read.
Practical details
Cancel any time, from your account page. Cancellation stops the next renewal and access continues to the end of the period you paid for.
There is no free trial, because the free tier already lets you read the publication every week before deciding.
Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details never reach 8(a) Digest.
What it will not do
It will not tell you what to bid. Each entry points at the gate on an opportunity, the one requirement that decides whether it is yours, and stops there. That decision is yours, and the record is on SAM.gov.
Summaries and fit notes are editorial interpretations of public data and may contain errors. Always verify every detail, including deadlines, set-aside type, NAICS code, and eligibility, against the official SAM.gov record before responding to anything.
8(a) Digest is an independent publication and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration or any government agency. It is market intelligence, not bid, procurement, or legal advice.