Privacy policy

Last updated October 6, 2026. Questions go to [email protected].

What this service is

Permit Digest emails contractors a weekly summary of building permits issued by city and county building departments in Northeast Ohio, filtered to the trades they choose. The permit records come from public records requests made to those departments under Ohio Revised Code 149.43.

What we collect about you

• Your email address, so we can send the digest you asked for.
• Your county, trades, plan, and optionally a business name and trade, which is what decides the contents of your digest.
• A Stripe customer and subscription identifier, so your subscription can be billed and managed.
• Delivery records: which digest weeks were sent to you, when, how many permits each contained, and any delivery error.

We do not use advertising trackers, we do not run analytics scripts on the site, and we do not sell, rent or share your information with anyone for marketing.

Homeowners are not the product

This is the part worth stating plainly. Some department exports we receive contain the property owner's name, and occasionally a phone number. We drop those fields on import. They are not written to the permit records we keep, they are never shown on this site, and they are never included in a digest. What a digest contains is the permit itself: the job address, the date, the type of work, the declared value, the permit number, and the contractor or applicant where the department names one. Contractors are businesses. Private individuals are not listed.

There is one thing we do keep, and it is only honest to say so: a complete, unaltered copy of every document a department sends us, with a hash and the time it arrived. We need it to show that each permit we publish came from a public record and was not invented or inferred, and an edited copy could not show that. Those originals are held in private storage that only the operator can read. They are not published, not searchable, not sent to anyone, and not what a digest is built from — the permit data we store is filtered first, and that filtered data is all the site and the digests ever see. Our own error reports can quote a line of a document a parser could not read, so personal data is removed from them before they are stored, shown or emailed.

If you believe a digest has included personal information about a private individual, tell us at [email protected] and we will remove it and fix the import that let it through.

Payments

Subscriptions are billed through Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe's own checkout page and are never sent to or stored on our servers. We see only what Stripe reports back: that a subscription exists, its status, and the identifiers needed to manage it.

Email

Digests are sent through Resend, an email delivery provider, which processes the message in order to deliver it. Every digest carries a one-click unsubscribe link and header. Unsubscribing stops the mail immediately and cancels the subscription.

Google API services

Permit Digest uses the Gmail API with a single scope, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.send, and uses it only to send our own public records requests from our own mailbox. It does not read mail, does not access any other person's Google account, and does not request access to anyone else's Google data. Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

How long we keep things

Subscriber records are kept while the subscription is active and for up to one year afterwards, so that billing history and delivery history remain reconcilable. Permit records are public records and are kept indefinitely. Ask us to delete your subscriber record and we will, subject to any records we are required to retain for tax purposes.

Your choices

• Change your county, trades or email address on your management page, linked from any digest.
• Unsubscribe with one click from any digest, or write to us.
• Ask what we hold about you, or ask us to delete it, at [email protected].

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who receives it, we will say so in a digest rather than only editing this page.