If you represent a town
Your residents can already read your record. We'd rather do this with you.
Everything we hold is a public record your town already publishes. You don't have to sign anything, pay anything, or change any process for that to be true — which is precisely why we write to towns first, and why a town that asks us to stop is obeyed.
The straight version
What we do, and what we will never do.
We are not the town, and we say so everywhere
Every page states we're unaffiliated. We don't take your logo, we don't present ourselves as an official channel, and we don't answer on your behalf.
We never edit your record
We index what you published, cite it, and link back to it. A town cannot pay us to soften a summary or bury a document — that firewall is the whole product, and it protects residents from us as much as from anyone.
We crawl politely, and we write first
Rate limits, daily caps and a crawler that identifies itself with a real contact address. If our traffic is ever a nuisance, one email stops it.
You can have your data back, any time
A full export of everything we hold for your town, including anything your staff created here. You have retention obligations; a vendor who makes those harder is a vendor you shouldn't buy.
What a town gets out of it
Fewer of the same three phone calls.
Most of what a small town office fields is not complicated — it's the same handful of questions, asked by people who genuinely cannot find the answer. When those are self-serve and cite the actual minutes, the calls that reach a clerk are the ones that need a person.
A public record people can actually use
Residents stop asking you to find the document, and start arriving having read it.
Fewer records requests for things already published
A searchable archive answers most of what a routine request is really after.
A better-informed room
People who can see the history of a decision argue about the decision, not about what happened.
Cost
Free for your residents. Always.
Residents read the record for nothing, and there is no advertising anywhere in the product — a civic record funded by advertising is a civic record with a buyer.
Where a town chooses to pay, it's for tools that save the office time — the reporting and paperwork work described on the town office page — at a fixed annual price, not a meter. Small towns cannot budget against a meter, and a bill that varies with how much staff use a tool teaches staff not to use it.
Being straight about where we are. We're early, and we'd rather say so than let you find out. No town is paying us yet. We cover seven jurisdictions across two counties — the current list is here, read from the records rather than maintained by hand — and a county economic development office has reviewed the product and is supporting our grant applications. We're a small Maryland company, not an established vendor. If you need references, procurement paperwork or a security questionnaire answered, ask — we keep those written down, and we'd rather show you the honest version than a brochure.
If you'd rather we didn't
Then we don't.
Tell us and we stop crawling your site, and if you want, delete what we hold for your town. We've already paused crawls on our own initiative rather than wait to be told — including for the town this was built for, and for a town whose vendor terms we couldn't satisfy. If you'd prefer to hand us files directly, or have us make a formal records request instead of crawling, that suits us better than crawling does.