GrantTrove and USAspending, side by side
How GrantTrove and USAspending differ on price, coverage and what each one shows about a record. Every USAspending figure was checked on 2026-09-07.
What USAspending is genuinely good at
This section is not a formality. USAspending is a real product with real advantages, and a reader deciding between the two is better served by knowing them than by a page that pretends they do not exist.
- It answers the question a listing of open opportunities cannot: who has already won this money, and how much.
- A documented public API with no key and no account, which makes it genuinely usable rather than merely public.
- Award records join to programmes by assistance listing number, so a notice you are reading can in principle be matched to what the programme awarded before.
Where GrantTrove is different
Where the two products actually diverge, point by point.
- Every record shows when it was last checked, against which source domain, and by which method.
- Programme pool and per-award ceiling are separate fields that are never shown under one label.
- Core fields — amounts, deadlines, eligibility, source link, verification stamp — are free without an account, permanently.
- A field the source did not state reads Not stated rather than being filled with a plausible value.
And the honest cost of that. Coverage is early. The data sources page publishes exactly which feeds are connected and which are not. If your search depends on breadth today rather than on traceability, USAspending has more records than we do and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Price
What each side charges, and what the free tier holds back.
GrantTrove pricing checked 2026-09-02 against our own pricing page.
USAspending pricing checked 2026-09-07 against USAspending’s own pricing page.
Field by field
Field by field, with the ones neither side publishes marked as such.
| Field | GrantTrove | USAspending |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A grant database where every field is traceable to one official page and carries the date we last confirmed it. | The federal government's public record of what it actually spent — awards made, to whom, under which programme — free and available through a documented API. |
| Cheapest paid entry | $19/mo · read from the price config at render | $0 · checked 2026-09-07 |
| Readable without paying | Every field of every record, permanently | Not measured |
| Coverage the product publishes | Records linked 1,734 · Verified inside the freshness window 1,160 of 1,160 | Top-tier agencies 111 · Award search history Back to 2007-10-01 |
| Shows when a record was last checked | Yes — date, source domain and method on every record | Not measured |
| Separates programme pool from award ceiling | Yes, always two fields under two labels | Not measured |
| What an empty field shows | Not stated, Not confirmed or Not linked yet — three different sentences | Not measured |
| Eligibility restrictions on who may subscribe | None stated | None stated |
“Not measured” means we have not audited that property of USAspending and will not guess at it. Every USAspending figure above comes from a page USAspending publishes about itself, checked 2026-09-07.
What this page does not claim
What this page does not claim, and how it was written.
We do not publish a record count of our own counting for another product, a freshness figure we have not sampled, or an accuracy rate for anyone. Doing so would require an audit with a stated method and a date, and we have not run one. Where a comparison would need such a number, the row above reads Not measured.
Use USAspending for the question we cannot answer: who won this money before, and how much. It is free, it has a documented API, and it is authoritative about the past. Use GrantTrove for what is open now, with every field traceable to the notice it came from and dated. Neither one substitutes for the other, and a search that only uses one of them is missing half the picture.