There are thousands of funding programs available to small businesses — grants, loans, tax credits, and more. The landscape shifts constantly: programs open, deadlines pass, new money gets announced. FundBug keeps track of all of it so you don't have to.
Funding programs for small businesses are scattered across federal agencies, state economic development offices, local BIDs, CDFIs, corporate foundations, and nonprofit funds. There is no single place to look. And the landscape doesn't stay put — programs open and close throughout the year, deadlines come and go, and new opportunities get announced without much fanfare.
Staying on top of all of it would mean monitoring dozens of portals, reading fine print, and spending time you don't have evaluating whether something is even worth applying for. Most business owners can't do that — not because they don't care, but because they're running a business.
FundBug does the monitoring for you. We track what's open, what's closing, and what's new — and on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month we send you a ranked digest of the programs that actually fit your business right now.
When you sign up, you tell us about your business — your industry, where you operate, how long you've been running, who owns it, what you're working toward. That profile becomes the lens we use to filter and rank every program in our database.
The database is built by searching through thousands of funding programs — federal agencies, state economic development offices, local BIDs, CDFIs, corporate foundations, and more. Most of what we find gets filtered out: nonprofit-only grants, government agency programs, science and healthcare-specific funding, programs that have closed or aren't accepting applications. What makes it into the database has been individually reviewed by a real person to confirm it's current, accurate, and relevant to for-profit small businesses like the ones we serve.
Your digest lands on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month. The first program is always your strongest grant opportunity right now. Everything else is ranked by fit and competition level, with a plain-English note explaining why it's relevant to your business specifically — and an eligibility confidence indicator so you know at a glance whether you're a strong candidate before you spend time on it.
The digest is where FundBug starts, not where it ends. Every program that appears in your digest is automatically added to your subscriber portal under My Tracker. You can star the ones you're seriously pursuing, update their status as you move from interested to applied to won, and keep your entire funding pipeline in one place.
For programs you decide to pursue, FundBug's Application Prep feature generates draft answers to the standard questions that appear on most grant applications — what your business does, how you'd use the funds, what the impact would be — written specifically for that program and drawn from your business profile. The drafts are a starting point. You refine them, add the specific details only you know, and submit something that sounds like you.
As you edit and improve those draft answers, FundBug learns from them. Your refined language carries forward to the next application, so each prep session starts closer to your actual voice than the last one.
Reach us at hello@fundbug.net. We're a small operation and we read every email.