Free for nonprofit institutions
A fair, well-run investment advisor search. Without the spreadsheet.
RFP Free helps your committee draft the RFP, invite firms, and compare responses side by side. Structured questions, sealed submissions, and a comparison grid that cites its sources and recommends no one.
Sealed submissionsNo scoring or rankingOrganizations never pay
A $600M endowment doesn’t need fifteen unsolicited bids. It needs a well-run process among a few firms it has already vetted, asked the same questions and compared on the same terms.
Most searches run on email threads and mismatched PDFs, and the hardest part isn’t collecting responses. It’s comparing them honestly. RFP Free gives the process a spine: the same core questions in every RFP, typed answers instead of prose, and a comparison layer that shows its work.
62
fixed questions, identical in every search
0
rankings, scores, or recommendations
$0
for organizations — no billing exists
100%
of figures cited to their source
How it works
Four steps, from blank page to board packet.
- 01
Draft the RFP
A guided intake interview turns what your committee cares about into a complete, professional RFP. Sixty-two fixed questions appear in identical wording every time.
a complete draft RFP
- 02
Invite firms
Send private invitations to the firms your committee already knows and trusts. Each firm answers the same structured questions, so nothing gets lost in a stack of mismatched PDFs.
private invitation links
- 03
Collect responses
Firms submit typed answers and attachments on their own time, with save-and-resume. Submissions stay sealed until your deadline passes. No early looks, for anyone.
sealed responses
- 04
Compare, decide, record
See fees, service models, and terms side by side, every figure linked to its source. The grid never scores or recommends. When you choose, export a board-ready decision record.
a board-ready decision record
What makes it fair
The commitments are the product.
An investment committee acts as a fiduciary. A tool it relies on has to earn that trust in how it’s built, not just what it claims.
Free for organizations, always
Not for the platform, not for the comparison layer, not for the decision record. Organizations never pay. The people running the search are the reason the tool exists.
No billing exists on the organization side
No scoring. No ranking. No recommendation.
The comparison layer extracts and compares with citations. It will never tell you who to pick. Any output that ranks firms or suggests a choice is a defect, not a feature.
Enforced in the data layer, not the interface
Every figure traces to its source
Each cell in the comparison grid links back to the exact answer it came from. If there is no source, there is no cell. Fee math runs in code, never guessed by a model.
Fee math runs in code, never in a model
Confidential by construction
Draft searches are invisible outside your organization. Sealed responses are unreadable until the deadline passes, checked against the clock rather than the honor system.
Sealed against the clock, not the honor system
Who it’s for
Built for institutions with a fiduciary duty.
If your organization holds an endowment, a reserve, or a pension and answers to a board, RFP Free is built for the way you already run a search.
- Hospital systems
- Universities & colleges
- Private foundations
- Community foundations
- Religious institutions
- Associations & other nonprofits
Fair questions
The reasons committees hesitate, answered straight.
A fiduciary should be skeptical of a free tool holding confidential search intentions. These are the questions we’d ask in your seat.
- Free usually means we're the product. What's the catch?
- The plan is for the advisor side to fund the platform eventually. Firms may one day pay for tools that speed up their own responses. What they will never buy is placement, early access, influence on the comparison, or your identity. We take no success fee when a firm wins, so our revenue never depends on which firm you choose. Those commitments are written down, in plain language, on the neutrality page.
- Our search intentions are the most sensitive thing we hold.
- Draft searches are unreachable outside your organization. Not hidden by a setting, but excluded at the query level, so there is no path that exposes them. Responses stay sealed until your deadline. An organization that withholds its identity is never named to firms. We treat the list of who is searching as the one asset that can never be sold.
- We already run this by email, or our consultant handles it.
- Keep your process and your people. RFP Free is the plumbing, not the advice. It replaces the spreadsheet and the stack of mismatched PDFs, not your judgment or your consultant's. Committees that work with an advisor or consultant can run the same process here and spend their meetings on the decision instead of the collation.
- We can't tell our board an AI picked the advisor.
- It can't, by design. AI drafts questions and transcribes fee language into a structured shape. That is all it does. Every calculation runs in ordinary code, every figure in the grid links to the firm's own words, and nothing in the product scores, ranks, or recommends. The decision record your board sees contains your committee's reasoning, not a machine's.
- We run a search every five to seven years. It's not worth learning a tool.
- There is nothing to learn. A guided interview drafts the RFP with you, firms respond through a link you send, and the comparison builds itself. If you want it, you also get direct, hands-on help from us at every step. This should be less work than the way you did it last time, not more.
- Will serious firms actually respond through a platform?
- The invitation comes from your committee, not from us. You choose the firms, and they receive a private link with your deadline. Responding is free for them, and structured questions with save-and-resume are faster to answer well than a sixty-page PDF. Firms take the process as seriously as the institution running it.
Run your next advisor search the way a fiduciary should.
Free for your organization, from the first draft to the decision record.