Terms of Service.

1. Acceptance

By creating an account, subscribing to a paid plan, or using the PermitCore website, API, exports or email alerts (together, the Service), you agree to these Terms. If you accept them on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you may bind that organisation, and “you” means that organisation.

We record which version of these Terms you accepted at signup. The version identifier appears at the top of this page.

2. Definitions

• Data — permit records sourced from municipal publications, as delivered through any part of the Service.
• Derived Fields — the fields PermitCore generates which are not present in the upstream municipal publication: cohort and segment assignment, work classification, building subtype, normalised address and parcel identifiers, canonicalised contractor identity, detected brands, building-characteristic estimates, and data-quality flags.
• Derived Output — your analysis, reports, lead lists, CRM records, models or dashboards produced from the Data.
• Export — any file leaving our systems: a CSV download, a bulk Parquet or CSV.gz delivery, or an accumulation of API responses.

3. Licence

Subject to these Terms and payment of any applicable fees, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the Data for your own internal business purposes, including creating Derived Output. Entitlements differ by plan — the Free plan is capped at 90 days of history; bulk delivery and full history are Enterprise entitlements.

4. Republishing and redistribution

4.1 Your Derived Output is yours. You own the Derived Output you create and may use, disclose and commercialise it without further obligation to us, provided it does not itself constitute or embed a Substantial Portion of the Data. Analyses, reports, lead lists, CRM records, models and internal dashboards built from the Data are expressly permitted.

4.2 Republication is restricted. You shall not, and shall not permit any third party to, publish, distribute, sell, sublicense, syndicate or otherwise make available to any person who is not a PermitCore subscriber: (a) a Substantial Portion of the Data; (b) any Export, in whole or in part, in its delivered form or a materially equivalent one; or (c) any product or service whose principal function is to provide third parties with access to the Data or a substitute for it.

4.3 Substantial Portion. A “Substantial Portion” means any set of records that, alone or combined with prior disclosures, comprises the whole or a material part of the Data for any jurisdiction, permit class or time period, or which includes our Derived Fields for more than a de minimis number of records.

Open: the threshold for “de minimis” in 4.3 has not been set. We have deliberately not published a number here rather than assert one that has not been decided. Until it is set, we will read this clause against its stated purpose: use the data, build on it, act on it — do not stand up a substitute for it.

4.4 Public records are unaffected. Nothing in this section restricts your independent right to obtain, use or republish permit records directly from the issuing municipality or its open-data publication. This section restricts redistribution of the Data as delivered by PermitCore — our compilation and our Derived Fields — not the underlying public records.

4.5 Attribution on permitted disclosure. Where you publicly disclose figures or extracts derived from the Data, please attribute PermitCore as the source. Doing so does not convert a permitted disclosure into a republication.

4.6 Bulk delivery. Exports delivered under a bulk-delivery entitlement are licensed for your internal use only. You shall not transfer an Export, or the signed URL by which it is delivered, to any third party.

5. Upstream data and attribution

5.1 The permit records underlying the Data are published by US municipal and county authorities. We do not own those records and do not purport to license them.

5.2 Your use of the Data remains subject to the terms under which the issuing authority publishes the underlying records. Where those terms are more restrictive than these Terms, the upstream terms govern as to the underlying records. We publish the licence applicable to each source, per jurisdiction, at permitcore.io/sources, and you are responsible for reviewing the terms applicable to the jurisdictions you use.

5.3 Certain sources request or require attribution to the issuing authority. Where you republish or publicly disclose records originating from such a source, you shall provide the attribution that source requires. The applicable licence is identified per source on the sources page. Licence terms are preserved and published per source; they are not carried as a per-record field.

5.4 Our Derived Fields are our own work and are licensed under these Terms. Nothing here grants you rights in the underlying municipal records beyond those the issuing authority grants directly.

6. Prohibited uses

6.1 You shall not use the Data, or any Derived Output, in whole or in part, as a factor in establishing any individual's eligibility for: (a) credit or insurance, or the terms of either; (b) employment, promotion, reassignment or retention; (c) the rental or lease of residential property, or tenant screening of any kind; or (d) any other purpose for which a consumer report is used or expected to be used under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq., or any state or local analogue.

6.2 PermitCore is not a consumer reporting agency, the Data is not a consumer report, and we do not maintain the permissible-purpose verification or the consumer dispute and reinvestigation procedures such a regime requires. These uses are prohibited rather than disclaimed for that reason: we cannot support them, so they are outside the licence.

6.3 You shall not use the Data to make decisions about, or build profiles of, identifiable natural persons in their personal capacity. Use of contractor, applicant and other business-entity information for business-to-business purposes is permitted — that is what the Service is for.

6.4 You shall not resell or share API credentials, circumvent rate limits or quotas, or scrape the website to reconstruct the Data. Breach of this section is a material breach and grounds for immediate termination without refund.

7. Fees, term and termination

7.1 Paid plans bill monthly or annually in advance and renew automatically until cancelled. You may cancel at any time from your dashboard. Monthly plans are not prorated on cancellation; annual plans prorate the unused portion.

7.2 Access ends. On expiry or termination, your right to access the Service and to receive further Data ends immediately.

7.3 What you already have, you keep. Data delivered to you during the term may continue to be used for your own internal business purposes after termination, and Derived Output created from it remains yours. We are not going to ask you to delete a file you paid for.

7.4 The compilation licence does not survive. Your licence to our Derived Fields and to the Data as a compilation ends on termination. You shall not, after termination, use retained Data to construct, populate or maintain a dataset, product or service of the kind restricted by section 4.2.

Open: the boundary between 7.3 and 7.4 is stated in purpose rather than in a precise test, and is under review. The intent: querying your retained copy to answer your own questions is 7.3; keeping it refreshed, indexed and available as a dataset is 7.4.

7.5 Survival. Sections 4, 5, 6, 7.4, 8 and 9 survive termination.

8. Accuracy and disclaimer

The Service is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

Specifically, and because these are the ways the Data is most easily misread:

• Valuations are municipal filings, not appraisals. A valuation is what an applicant declared to a city. It is not a construction cost, a contract value, or an assessment.
• Some values are known to be unreliable, and we say so. We flag placeholder and out-of-bounds values, and we suppress a cohort valuation entirely rather than publish a figure we do not trust. Flagging is not a guarantee that unflagged values are correct.
• Coverage is partial and changes. Jurisdictions are added, and upstream sources can go stale or be retired. Freshness is surfaced per metro.
• Enrichment fields are estimates — roof area, HVAC tonnage and similar are named as estimates and are sparsely populated outside some metros.
• Contractor identity is a canonicalisation, not a legal identity. We merge filings under a canonical contractor by name similarity and licence anchoring. A merge can be wrong.

The Data is a compilation of third-party filings which may be incomplete, delayed, superseded or erroneous at source. We do not verify filings against physical reality. You must not rely on the Data as the sole basis for a valuation, safety, or regulatory-compliance decision.

9. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, PermitCore is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary damages, or for lost profits, revenues or data, arising out of or relating to your use of the Service.

Open: a monetary cap on direct liability has not been set, and we have not published one rather than assert a figure nobody has agreed to honour. Until a cap is set and published, this section limits the categories of damages above and nothing further, and any mandatory statutory rights you have are unaffected.

10. Changes

We may revise these Terms. When we change what you may or may not do, we will publish a new version identifier and effective date at the top of this page. Continued use after the effective date is acceptance of the revised Terms. We ship product changes frequently; coverage can grow and, when an upstream source is retired, it can shrink.

11. Contact

Questions about these Terms, including anything marked open above: kian@permitcore.io. See also our privacy policy, which covers personal data we hold about you as a customer.

PermitCore, Inc., 1301 N Broadway STE 14399, Los Angeles, CA 90012