About
One person, one pipeline, one weekly brief.
The Buildout is an automated editorial product built and operated by a solo developer. There is no team, no investors, no marketing department. There is a Python pipeline, a Postgres database, a Next.js site, and a once-a-week brief that goes out on Sundays.
The premise
The U.S. federal government obligates roughly $2 trillion every year through public databases that almost no one reads. The data is free; the schemas are inconsistent; the same recipient appears under twelve different name variants; agency-level RSS feeds are half-broken. We do the boring work: ingest, normalize, classify, link entities, and write up the part a person actually wants to know.
What you get
- A weekly brief with the most consequential awards, rules, and opportunities, synthesized into one short read.
- A free watchlist: pick recipients you care about and get an email when they show up in new awards.
- Long-form recipient profiles — every major contractor, every grant recipient, the awards, the agencies, the trajectory.
- A read-only public API if you want to wire any of this into your own product.
How it's made
Every record is pulled directly from a primary U.S. government source. Sector classification, plain-English summaries, and the weekly intro paragraph are generated by Claude (Anthropic) and clearly marked where they appear. Everything else is deterministic code. The full method is documented on the methodology page.
Who reads it
See who this is for.
Contact
hello@thebuildout.site — for tips, corrections, partnership ideas, or API quota requests.