PermitPulse

PermitPulse is a web app (with a lightweight mobile companion) that aggregates and normalizes public building/permit data to show residents and local businesses what’s stuck, where, and why. Users can search an address or project, see timeline benchmarks (intake, review, revisions, approval), compare against city medians, and subscribe to status changes. An AI layer summarizes messy plan-check notes into plain English, flags likely missing items, and suggests the next best action (e.g., which department to contact, what document is typically required). The civic-tech angle is accountability: anonymized dashboards show bottlenecks by department and time, and residents can share “delay receipts” with council offices or journalists. Brutal truth: most cities have inconsistent data and will not cooperate; the product must work even with partial feeds, scraping, and FOIA uploads from users. Monetization is primarily B2B: contractors, expediters, and developers pay to reduce uncertainty.