Plain-language answers from your city’s adopted code, fee schedule and plans — with the section or table they came from, for every planner on staff.
Yes, a duplex is permitted with conditions in the MD-17 district.
| Standard | MD-17 |
|---|---|
| Max density | 17 units / acre |
Site-plan review runs $250 + $20 per 1,000 sq ft of floor area.
Generic AI guesses. Spoonbill cites. Every answer is drawn only from your city’s adopted code, fee schedule, and plans — traceable to the section and the date it took effect.
“What's the max height in C-2?” No section numbers, no boolean operators — ask the way you'd ask a colleague.
Each response links to the exact section, table, or plan, in a document stamped with its effective date, so you can defend it in the public record.
Answers come only from your city's adopted code, plans, and fees — never another jurisdiction's rules, never a generic web guess.
Zoning code, fee schedule, comprehensive / transportation / CIP plans, and parcel data, all searchable from one place.
Professionals already expect AI to give back about 4 hours a week (Thomson Reuters, 2024), and Spoonbill targets the task planners repeat most: finding the answer in the documents. It pays for itself if it saves each planner as little as one to two hours a week.
What professionals already expect AI to give them back (Thomson Reuters, 2024).
Fully-loaded cost of a U.S. planner's time (BLS 2023 + overhead).
All Spoonbill needs to save each planner to pay for itself — everything beyond that is reinvested capacity.
Adjust the sliders to estimate the productivity you'd recover.
Illustrative estimate at ~$55/loaded hour × 48 working weeks. Actual results depend on your team and usage.
Start free in minutes. No credit card, no procurement. That's the only step on your side.
We index everything into a private, jurisdiction-scoped library: nothing to install, no data migration, no IT ticket.
Everyone gets plain-language answers with citations, always up to date as your code changes.
A question that used to mean pulling three documents and verifying versions now takes one question — and I can show the applicant exactly where the answer comes from.
Everything Spoonbill indexes is already a public record: your adopted code, fee schedule, and plans. The only private data we hold is your team's own questions. That's it.
Built to clear an IT and legal review before anyone asks.
Adopted codes, fees, plans and parcel records: public documents, indexed and kept current. No private dataset to leak.
Your questions, the sites you look at, and your account info are never sold and never used to train shared or third-party models.
Encrypted in transit and at rest with AES-256, passwordless sign-in, and US-based hosting. SOC 2 on the roadmap.
Designed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508. A VPAT is available on request.
Department plans start at $750 a month for cities under 25,000 residents and scale with population, never with seats. Every planner in your department is included. Start free for 14 days, no credit card; we'll quote your tier before the trial ends.
The only difference is scale: larger cities have more code, fees, and plans to index. No feature limits, no user caps, on any plan.
Every answer is built only from the city's adopted documents, and each one links straight to the source: the exact section, and the effective date of the document it comes from, so you can confirm it in a click. Spoonbill doesn't draw on the open web or outside knowledge; if the answer isn't in the documents, it tells you rather than filling the gap. You're never taking its word for it, because you're taken to the passage it came from.
Spoonbill gets your team to the right section and citation faster. It doesn't replace professional judgment. The adopted document is always the authority, and your planner confirms the citation, shown right in the answer, before it goes into a determination, staff report, or public response. Think of it as the fastest path to the code, not a substitute for the planner reading it.
Automated watchers monitor each city's published sources for changes. When an ordinance, fee, or plan is updated, Spoonbill wipes the old index and rebuilds it from the current documents, so what you search always mirrors what's actually adopted, with no superseded language left behind. The refresh runs on its own; there's nothing to re-upload or maintain.
Keyword search finds documents that contain a word and leaves you to read them. Spoonbill answers the actual question across all of them at once, following cross-references, pulling the right number out of a fee table, and citing the specific section. You get the answer and its source, not a stack of PDFs to comb through.
No. Your code, fees, and plans are public records, so we index them for you. There's nothing to send us and no IT project to schedule. Most departments are up and running in days, and newly adopted documents are picked up as they take effect.
It's the point. Everyone reads the same index of your adopted code and gets the same cited answer, so the applicant who walks up to the counter already has the section your planner would have pulled. Fewer speculative questions, better-prepared submittals, and a citation you both agree on.
No. Your questions, the sites you look at, and your account information are never sold and never used to train shared or third-party models. Spoonbill only searches the adopted public documents to answer your questions.
Yes. Start the free trial with no card, and when you're ready we support annual invoicing, purchase orders, W-9, and a security packet for your review. Larger cities and counties can also buy through cooperative contract vehicles.
Start a free 14-day trial with your city's documents. No credit card, no commitment.