I built a zero-backend grant finder on live grants.gov data — the API and matching approach

Finding federal grants is weirdly hard for how much money is on the table. Grants.gov lists thousands of open opportunities, but the search UI is built for people who already know the CFDA numbers and agency codes. If you're a founder, a small nonprofit, or a researcher who just wants to know "what's open that fits what I do," it's a slog.

I built a small tool to fix that for myself, and this is the technical writeup — the API, the ranking, and why I kept it zero-backend.

The data source: grants.gov Search2 API

Grants.gov exposes a public JSON API. The one you want is the Search2 endpoint:

POST https://api.grants.gov/v1/api/search2