Not "public if you know where to look." Not "public if you can afford the subscription." Just public — free to search, free to download, forever.
A building permit sign went up on a street near ours, and we wanted to know one simple thing: what's actually being built there. That question should take two minutes. Instead it took the better part of an hour — a council portal that only lets you search one meeting at a time, a permit report that the city overwrites every single week so last month's record is just gone, and a public notices page with no search function at all.
None of that information was secret. It was all, technically, public record. It just wasn't usable. So we started keeping our own archive — and then went further, automating the collection so that nothing a city hall publishes gets lost, overwritten, or buried in a PDF ever again.
The data was already ours. We just had to stop losing it.
Once we started digging, we learned we weren't the first to notice this gap — just the first who didn't want to charge for closing it. A handful of commercial civic-data platforms already aggregate exactly this: meeting minutes, permits, zoning applications, development timelines. Access typically starts at hundreds of dollars a year, sold to law firms, developers, and sometimes back to the very municipalities that published the data for free in the first place.
The underlying records are public. The aggregation, search, and structure are what's being sold — and priced for institutions, not residents. We don't think finding out what your own council decided last Tuesday should require a corporate budget. So we're building the free version, and we intend to keep it that way.
These aren't marketing promises — they're constraints we build the software around.
Every meeting, permit, notice, and project page is open to everyone. There is no premium tier — this is the whole product.
Read, search, and download without creating an account or handing over an email address you didn't choose to give.
Every record links back to the city's own page. We're a navigation layer over the official record, never a replacement for it.
CSV and JSON for every dataset, updated on every daily run — build on top of it, no API key required.
We could move faster by cutting corners on any one city. We'd rather move city by city and get each one right — verified sources, respectful scraping, and AI summaries checked against the original agenda.
Don't see your city? Tell us where to go next — we prioritize by demand and by how accessible each city makes its own records.
Everything on Citizen Index comes from public municipal records. Applicant mailing addresses are deliberately left out of permit listings — we publish what's useful for transparency, not what's useful for junk mail. If something here is inaccurate, or you believe a record shouldn't be republished, reach out and we'll handle it promptly.
Citizen Index is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any city or municipality.