Self-serve grant execution
One person is doing the work of a whole grants team.
An ED, a development director, or a committed volunteer with about 30 hours a month, holding research, verification, writing, and follow-up in one calendar. No one can do all of it well at once, and it is not for lack of skill.
Sharke is the grant team they run: it does the finding and verifying, so their hours go to grants with documented fit, not dead ends, and the pipeline stops living in one person's head. Self-serve, $159 a month.
Start self-serve, $159 a month →No contract. Cancel anytime.
Not sure yet? Start with the $79 Grant Funding Viability Assessment, a board-ready read in 48 hours.
Where the math breaks down
No one person can be a whole grants team.
Research, the pursue-or-pass call, the writing, the follow up: it is four jobs in one calendar. When everything is urgent, the long-horizon cultivation is what has to wait, and that is exactly where the best multi-year funders are.
Some of those hours go to grants that were never a real fit, and not because anyone misjudged them. Whether a funder actually backs an organization like yours lives in their 990s and award history, not in the call for proposals. About 1 in 4 grants in the pipelines Sharke has reviewed had no documented fit in the funder's own record, something no one can see from the inside.
Share of pipeline grants with no documented fit in the funder's record: based on grant pipelines reviewed by Sharke.
Give that person a second set of hands, and carrying all of it alone stops being the only option.
Why waiting is already late
Next year's funding is being decided right now.
By the time a grant is needed, the cycle that funds it has usually already closed.
The funders who will write checks next year are building those relationships this cycle. The programs renewing next year are reviewing who fits now. None of it waits for a free week to open up. By the time the grant is on the list, the cycle is underway and the room is full.
Roughly 70% of foundations do not accept unsolicited proposals. That money goes where a funder already has a relationship. The cultivation that earns it starts months before the grant posts, not the week your team applies. Sharke surfaces the invite-only funders worth building toward now, so whoever runs your grants is cultivating next year's funding before this year's runs out. And the room is getting more crowded: 87% of foundation leaders report rising demand for the grants they give.
Federal programs freeze and priorities shift, and a grant your team won before is no longer a safe bet to win again. When you need to replace that funding fast, there is no fast. The pipeline that catches the loss is the one your team started before it happened. Before your team commits the 50-plus hours a federal reapplication takes, Sharke verifies whether that program is funding this cycle and whether you still fit it now.
Share of U.S. foundations that do not accept unsolicited proposals: Foundation Center / Candid. Rising demand: Center for Effective Philanthropy, State of Nonprofits 2026.
What a verdict looks like
A real verdict, with the sources behind it.
Every verdict is built from the funder's own documented filings.
What self-serve includes
The full grants workspace, not another search tool.
Matching databases hand your person a longer list to triage, at $179 to $299 a month. Sharke does the opposite of adding to the pile: it does the finding, the verifying, and the first draft, so the list gets shorter and the hours get sharper.
- VerifyThe 25-hour mistakes stop this week. Every grant you are tracking gets a Decision Record: Pursue, Wait, or Move on, source-cited from the funder's own filings. The ones with no path leave the list before the next application starts.
- FindThe grants you never had time to find stop passing you by. Sharke continuously surfaces better-fit grants and funders, each already verified, starting from funders that have backed organizations like yours more than once. This is where the missed revenue lives.
- CultivateNext year's funding starts moving this cycle. Roughly 70% of foundations do not accept unsolicited proposals. Sharke shows who they actually fund, their openness to first-time grantees, and the invite-only doors worth cultivating now, while there is still time to be known before the check is written.
- DraftApplications go out instead of stalling at the blank page. Drafting grounded in your own materials and written against the funder's real requirements, ready for your person to review and make theirs.
- KeepThe pipeline survives a resignation. Every verdict, funder, and deadline in one place your organization owns: ready for a board meeting, and still there when staff change.
Matching-database pricing: published 2026 plans of the leading grant-discovery tools.
From a team that ran it
"We've always had more grants on our list than we realistically had capacity for, so most of the decisions came down to instinct and urgency. What surprised me was seeing which ones actually had real fit and which ones just sounded promising. A few we were counting on really weren't there once we looked closer."
Director of Development / Housing services nonprofit / $2.4M budgetWho built it
I have spent my career replacing gut calls with data: how the largest financial institutions set their global IT footprint, when mergers and acquisitions create value instead of destroying it, and which grants are worth winning, at for-profit and nonprofit organizations from NIH, NSF, and USDA to Meta and Google. I have done that work across the private sector and the White House Office of Management and Budget, and I sign off on every Sharke verdict myself.
Collin Brown / Wharton MBA / Founder, Sharke.ai
Two ways forward
Give your one grant person the leverage of a team.
Every month this runs on one person's spare hours, the same three things happen: hours go into grants that were never a real fit, deadlines with real fit pass unfound, and the relationships behind next year's checks do not start. Sharke turns all three around, starting the day you sign up.
Your person keeps the work in-house, with Sharke doing the finding and verifying before any hours go in. No onboarding, no new system to learn. You verify grants before a tool would have finished installing, and you stop committing time to grants that were never a match.
- → A source-cited verdict on every grant, before the hours go in
- → Better-fit grants and funders surfaced continuously, each verified
- → Drafting grounded in your organization's own materials
- → The whole pipeline in one place, board-ready, not in one person's head
No contract. Cancel anytime.
The funding behind your mission scored 0 to 100, your real runway in months, the grant pipeline your funding goal would take, and named funders that already back organizations like yours. Bring it to your board, then decide.
Get the Viability Assessment →One-time. No subscription.
Want it fully run for you instead? See Sharke as your grant director: the same verified pipeline, done for you, from $249 a month.
Grant work has two costs, and the one on your books is the smaller one. The first is the hours. The market prices them clearly: freelance grant writers run $35 to $60 an hour, flat-fee proposals run $1,000 to $8,000 each, and a matching database that only finds grants runs $179 to $299 a month. The second cost never shows up anywhere: the grants with real fit that pass every cycle because no one had the hours to find them, verify them, and get an application in. The median institutional grant in the public record is about $20,000. Miss one a year where the fit was documented and no application went in, and doing nothing has cost more than ten times what Sharke does. Self-serve is $159 a month: the finding, the verifying, the drafting support, and the pipeline. It is priced like a tool, doing the job of the hours you cannot hire.
Freelance rates and flat-fee ranges: Upwork grant-writer rate data and 2026 market guides. Database pricing: published 2026 plans. Median institutional grant: public grant record (IRS Schedule I), Sharke analysis.
Self-serve is $159 a month. The Grant Funding Viability Assessment is $79, one-time. Done for you, on its own page, starts at $249 a month, priced to how much of your mission rides on grants.
Questions
Before you decide
When can we start?
Today. Sign up and your workspace is live the same day: Sharke starts finding, verifying, and prioritizing your pipeline from the first login, with drafting support and deadline tracking included.
The person who runs our grants already has a system. Is this one more thing to learn?
No. The pipeline, the verdicts, and the drafts live in one place that replaces the spreadsheet, not another tool that feeds it. Most teams are reviewing their first verified grants the same day they sign up.
What happens when our development person moves on?
That is exactly what Sharke protects against. The average development professional stays around 16 to 18 months, and the median vacancy runs six months (CompassPoint and the Haas, Jr. Fund, UnderDeveloped). A pipeline that lives in one person's head leaves with them. One that lives in Sharke is inherited by the next person on day one: verdicts, funders, deadlines and all.
Is this AI, or is a person involved?
Both. Sharke does the research and drafting, and every verdict is built from documented funder filings, 990s, award history, and eligibility, not AI guesses. And a person stands behind it: the founder signs off on every verdict.
Do we have to sign a contract?
No. It is month to month, and you can cancel anytime.
The person running your grants is not the bottleneck.
Being the entire department is. Sharke fixes that, starting today.