PermitPal

PermitPal is the AI permit expediter. A general contractor emails plans + project address; the agent figures out which permits are required, logs into the right city portal, files the application, pays the fees, tracks review status, and drafts responses when plan reviewers leave comments. Charge is $500 per pulled permit — about a third of what human expediters charge in Austin.

The hard part isn't the AI — it's that every city runs a different permit portal. Austin uses Accela. Houston uses HRMS. Some smaller cities run OpenGov or ePermitHub. A handful still want PDFs emailed to a clerk. The architecture is per-jurisdiction adapters, each implementing a common interface (search permits, submit application, check status, respond to comments).

The browser-use layer handles the portals that don't have APIs — Claude drives a headless Chromium via the browser-use tool, and the agent re-plans whenever a portal UI changes. Adapters cache the stable selectors and bail out to vision-based clicks when the cache misses, which keeps cost down on the 80% of submissions where nothing changed.

Austin-first because Accela has good APIs and ~6,000 permits/month flow through it. The roadmap is the top 50 US cities by permit volume, mapped to their portal stacks.