Welcome to America’s Most Powerful Grant Search Tool
We’re proud to support friends and colleagues of The Knowledge Stack. The OpenGrants platform—a search engine and expert marketplace—unlocks non-dilutive U.S. funding for organizations around the world. Read on to learn how it works and create your account.
How it Works
1. Sign Up
Sign up and create your profile to get started instantly.
2. See If You Qualify
Use our QuickStart tool to see if you qualify for funding in 5 minutes.
3. Search On Your Own
Search the most comprehensive data set of public and private grant funding in the United States.
4. Hire an Expert
Hire a pro and set yourself up to win with our freelance grant writing marketplace.
5. Learn As You Go
Learn how grants work and understand the nuances of working with the government with free guides, office hours and webinars.
Pricing
FREE
- Create Your Funding Profile
- Search Grants
- Hire Grant Writers
- Weekly Office Hours & DIY Guides
ALERT
- Everything in FREE, plus:
- Save Grants to Your Profile
- Get Automated Email Alerts
- Save Your Notes (coming soon)
TRACK
- Everything in ALERT, plus:
- Advanced Search (coming soon)
- Export Search Results (coming soon)
- Personalized Recommendations
What People Are Saying
We just received a CalSeed grant to build a platform for financing electric vehicles. Working with OpenGrants was definitely the way to go. Their expertise and support was invaluable to winning these funds, and our company is moving forward as a result.
We’re grateful that someone took a hard look at the unnecessary complexities of the grants market and decided to fix it. We value OpenGrants’ ability to provide us timely information on grants we otherwise wouldn’t have time to look for. This helps us provide relevant info to our startups, partnerships and Chicostart. We’re excited to pursue a partnership that will benefit our ecosystem in the future.
FAQs
Our search engine, marketplace and education work for grantees is steadily organizing a wide array of stakeholders on a single platform. Our mission is to serve the public sector with the applicants and information needed to supercharge the work of distributing funding—to make it easier to meet mandates, faster to identify qualified applicants, and to provide the intelligence that hasn’t previously existed to enable effective and equitable deployment of funding. If you’re a public sector leader and would like to learn more about our roadmap or partner with us on this mission, email us at info@opengrants.io.
Sign up for free, or at the paid tier that will be most valuable to you. From there, depending on your preference, you can search our database for funding opportunities, or use our Quick Start tool to get matched to major funding categories in about 5 minutes.
If you want to talk to an expert at any time (whether or not you’ve found the grant you want to apply for), you can secure a meeting with an expert directly in the platform. We curate a marketplace of freelance grant developers who have extensive experience across the grant funding ecosystem. We match them to you based on their experience and your needs.
You can choose to hire someone for an hour and pay their hourly rate, or you can submit a refundable $99 deposit to request a proposal for a full grant writing project. This gets you a pitch and an introductory meeting with your matched writer. If you decide to move forward after meeting the writer and seeing the scope and costs, we’ll put the $99 toward your project. If you decide not to go forward, we’ll refund your $99 immediately.
The costs of writing and submitting a grant application—as well as your chances of winning—depend on many factors, including the program you’re applying for, the granting agency’s rules, your industry, the amount of the award, and whether you do it yourself or hire a grant writer.
As a very general guide, a $200K award might cost around $8K, a $500K award might cost around $15K, and a $2M award might cost around $30K.
One thing is certain—working with an expert improves your chances of winning by 3X. That’s why we curate a marketplace of talented freelance grant writers who can help guide you through your process. We also offer payment plans to help amortize your investment in a grant.
We’re creating the platform that makes grant funding approachable for the “rest of the market.” We started by building the most comprehensive database of public and private grants in the United States. Then, we made it easily searchable with a simple and intuitive user experience. Finally, we offer a variety of free educational resources including office hours and webinars to demystify grant funding for the people and organizations who have traditionally avoided it due to frustration and confusion.
All of our work has created a pipeline of innovative startups and nonprofits that need help winning a grant, and since we’re focused on building this platform, we’re not focused on being great grant developers. That’s where you come in.
We curate the most experienced and successful freelance grant writers and consultants (we say developers), then match them to our users based on your experience and the user’s goals. Our goal is to give users access to high quality talent that would otherwise be very difficult to find, while give you a pipeline of curated and qualified new projects to grow your business.
There are loads of great resources out there to help you assess eligibility for the breadth of available grant programs. The fastest way is to sign up here. We will evaluate your situation and match you to eligible grants in five minutes.
The next best place is grants.gov. You can filter and search for federal grants and get a general idea of your eligibility. Once you find something that you think is a fit, you will want to download the RFP document, which is usually a PDF.
Inside, search for the eligibility section and read it carefully. NOTE: RFPs are updated and changed from time to time, so double-check with the listed program contact to ensure you are eligible before investing time and resources in an application.
While a grant does result in a contract with the government, when people in the public sector talk about government contracting, they are not speaking about grants.
Governments all over the world contract out everything from laundry to national defense. Contracting can be a great way to land big customers with deep pockets. For all of your contracting needs, check out our friends at The Knowledge Stack!
No, they are not. Grants are a financial award typically given by the government or a charitable foundation. Tax credits are a deduction from Tax owning. OpenGrants is all about grants. To claim tax credits head over to our friends at MainStreet.
Our grant developers are vetted with a thorough review of their past work and an interview. We occasionally evaluate grant writers with a written test as well. We constantly evaluate and curate for the top 3% of grant development professionals in the United States.
No. That is generally seen as unethical, and you should be wary of grant writers who offer that.
We make money when you freelance hire grant writers through our platform, through paid subscriptions to our grant search engine, and through long-term service contracts with strategic partners.
Yes, you can! Many companies working with us simply hire consultants to help them strategize and navigate some of the specific nuances involved in working with a government agency.
Yes. You should always be concerned about your IP. However, many grant programs have mechanisms in place to protect you. Have your attorney review anything you sign with the government.
A grant is a method for the government to fund ideas and projects that provide public services, fuel innovation, and stimulate the economy. Grants support critical recovery initiatives, innovative research, and many other programs listed in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA).
The grant process follows a linear life cycle that includes creating the funding opportunity, collecting applications, making award decisions, and implementing the award.
Grants are non-dilutive and do not need to be paid back.
There are billions of dollars in grant funding available from both public and private sources. Startups can typically expect to be able to compete for funds required to de-risk and develop early-stage, innovative technologies. Startups that are not science-based can often find funding for solutions that provide a public good or solve social issues. Awards can be as little as $500 and as much as $100M. Our average award size is $1.75M for science-based, innovation funding.
The chances of winning a grant vary widely depending on how competitive the program is that you’re applying for, and how well positioned you are to leverage that funding. Some programs have a 10% win rate, while others may have an 80% win rate.
Experienced grant writers can outperform the average success rate by 50 points or more thanks to their familiarity with the nuances of the program, and their ability to navigate the paperwork.
The best advice we can give is to hire an expert who knows the program you’re interested in, or someone who can recommend a program you may not even be aware of. On average, hiring an expert will increase your chances of winning by 3X.
Generally speaking, it can take anywhere from 6 months to one year to receive federal funding. There are exceptions to that, but a good rule of thumb is to plan on one year for federal funding, which means you must strategize well in advance. Local and foundation grants may arrive significantly faster.