The earliest anyone can see a job coming is the day its permit is filed.

You should not pay for access, so we do not sell access. The dataset is open, free and unauthenticated, and its ID is printed all over this page precisely so you can go around us. What subscribers pay for is the reading: 2,744 permits crossed the file in the last 30 days (measured 2026-07-29), across every trade at once, and the one that matters to you is only worth something the morning it appears.

Here is what reading it yourself actually costs. In July 2026 the City retired the PERMIT - ELECTRIC WIRING permit type — it now returns zero records, all-time. Electrical work moved under PERMIT – EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM, spelled with an en-dash, not a hyphen; a query with the wrong dash matches zero rows. A DIY script keyed to the old type ships an empty electrical feed and never throws an error — it just goes quiet, and looks exactly like a slow week. We caught the change on 2026-07-29 while building sample packets: 165 electrical-scope express permits that week that the old filter would have silently missed. That is the product — not the file, the noticing.

The engine reads the City’s file at 07:00 America/Chicago every day, and the new records in your trade go out the same morning. One caveat, printed at the same weight as the promise: the City’s file itself runs about one day behind the counter — on 2026-07-29 its newest permit was issued 2026-07-28. We deliver the day a permit appears in the file, which is the earliest anyone outside the permit office can see it.

Yes — it is a monthly subscription and you can cancel at any time. No term, no exit call, no retention flow. If the feed ever stops being worth it, cancelling should be the obvious thing to do; we would rather you did that than keep paying for a login. The one exception is the 9-for-12 prepay, which is a 12-month term paid up front — that is the deal, and it is stated next to the price, not here.

One firm per trade and territory at $2,500/mo, and no one else gets that cut of the feed while you hold it. The other two tiers are deliberately not exclusive — every subscriber reads the same connected file, so nothing divides when a second firm joins. A territory must be confirmed open before money is taken; when one is sold, it comes off the page.

Two things. The feed is filtered to your trade, so you stop scanning plumbing rows to find sign jobs. And each record carries decision-maker contact info, so it arrives with someone to call instead of just an address. The underlying records are identical to the self-serve tier — enrichment changes what is attached to them, never what is in them.

One source: the City of Chicago’s building-permit dataset, ydr8-5enu on the City’s own data portal. Public, no login, no rate card, no data broker in the middle. Every number on this page was measured against it on the date printed beside the number, and every record in the feed links back to the City’s own copy of itself. Run the same queries; you will get the same counts.

Because the City publishes it. The dataset names the contractor on every permit, and we do not hold anything about you that you cannot pull yourself in a browser in about ten seconds. What we hold is your firm name, your trade, your business mailing city and ZIP, and two numbers: permits last month, permits this month. No personal contact details, no home addresses, no financial data. We did not buy your information from anyone. Reply once and we delete the record.

We remove the record and you do not hear from us again. We do not sell, share or rent anything, and there is nothing to sell — everything we have came from a public City file that anyone can download.

The feed is Chicago commercial permits. The permit signal is Chicago — that is where the public data is good enough to work from: named contractors, daily publication, a one-day lag. Other cities’ equivalents run months stale or publish no dates at all, and we will not sell a feed we cannot measure. If a second city ever clears the same bar, it will show up here with its own measured numbers first.

Pay 9 months up front — $2,241, which is 9 × $249 — and you get 12 months of the self-serve feed. Separately, the first five Illinois subscribers lock $249/month for life; the price rises after that. Five is a count, not a countdown timer — when the slots are gone, the offer comes off the page.