Bonfire is used by a growing number of Florida agencies for evaluated procurements in particular. It is free for suppliers, and its hard deadline lockout catches contractors who submit late more reliably than any paper process ever did.
Bonfire is a procurement platform built around evaluation. Agencies use it to publish solicitations, receive submissions, and score responses against published criteria — which makes it particularly common for RFPs and qualification-based procurements, though plenty of straightforward invitations to bid run on it too.
For suppliers, Bonfire is free. There is no subscription, no premium tier, and no charge for submitting. Agencies pay for the platform; you use it at no cost.
Registration is per-agency rather than universal. You create a supplier account and then engage with each agency’s Bonfire portal separately — a county, a city and a school district each running Bonfire will typically have three distinct portal addresses.
The practical effect is that you should register with each agency whose work you want, rather than assuming one registration covers a region. Bookmark each portal you use.
Bonfire is one platform among several. Registering on it is worthwhile and it does not mean you are seeing your county’s work — the county may be on Bonfire while the school board is on DemandStar and the city runs its own page.
This is where Bonfire differs most from paper processes and from some other platforms, and it is worth understanding before your first deadline.
The agency specifies exactly which documents are required, and the portal lists them as separate upload slots. A bid form, a bid bond, a references document, an addenda acknowledgement — each has its own place.
This is helpful, because the platform tells you what is missing rather than leaving you to discover it after opening. Work through the list methodically and the responsiveness risk drops considerably.
Agencies set permitted file types and size limits per slot. A scanned bond that exceeds the size cap will not upload, and discovering that at ten minutes to deadline is a genuinely bad experience.
Prepare files early, check them against the stated restrictions, and upload a draft version well ahead if the platform permits it.
At the stated closing time, the submission window closes. Not softly, not with a grace period, not subject to a conversation with the procurement officer. An upload in progress at the cutoff does not complete.
Submit hours early rather than minutes early. You can generally revise a submission up until the deadline, so an early upload costs you nothing and removes the single most avoidable way to lose a bid.
Because Bonfire is built for scoring, agencies using it for RFPs will often publish the evaluation criteria and weightings clearly within the portal.
Read those before deciding whether to respond. The weighting tells you what the agency actually values — if price is thirty percent and technical approach is forty, a low number will not carry you, and a firm without relevant experience should think carefully before spending days on a submission. Our guide to solicitation types covers the distinction in full.
Bonfire portals typically include a question submission function with a stated cutoff. Questions and the agency’s answers are usually published to all bidders, and those answers frequently become addenda that change scope or requirements.
Two habits follow. Ask questions early, before the cutoff, because scope ambiguity you notice on day two is worth clarifying. And check for addenda immediately before submitting, since answers to other bidders’ questions land throughout the period and can change your pricing.
Bonfire is a well-built platform and free for suppliers, which makes it one of the easier ones to work with. The difficulty is not Bonfire. It is that Bonfire is one of five or six systems in use across the agencies a single Florida contractor might reasonably bid.
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