About boulderpermitting.com

Purpose

boulderpermitting.com exists to shorten the round-trip between applicants and the Boulder County Community Planning & Permitting Office. Site Plan Review is expensive to enter and expensive to correct, and most of that cost sits in interpretation — between code sections and drawings, between a parcel and its neighborhood, between what a homeowner wants and what staff needs to see. The tools here use AI to do that interpretation faster and in a form both sides can read.

The pre-application conference is where this matters most. The red-X checklist a planner writes during the pre-app drives the entire SPR packet that follows, and the tone set in that meeting — shared understanding, or talking past each other — tends to set the tone for the rest of the review. The tools on this site are designed so an applicant can walk into the pre-app with site-specific interpretation, parcel-scoped concept drawings, and neighborhood context already in hand, so the conversation starts further down the field.

Vision

A permit conversation that starts with a shared, site-specific briefing — what the code, plan, and fire code actually say about this parcel, what the neighborhood already looks like, what the neighbors can live with — before the pre-application conference is even scheduled. Applicants arrive with fewer surprises, staff arrive with fewer cycles spent clarifying the same things, and the written record is better from the first meeting onward.

Pursuing the dream of building a home should be an enjoyable process. The prototype here is one small test of whether tools that any office, applicant, or licensed professional already has access to can make that dream a little more enjoyable, and a little less expensive, for everyone on both sides of the counter.

What this isn’t

The tools here are not a replacement for:

Licensed professionals.

Architecture, engineering, surveying, and code interpretation are the work of licensed people. The goal of this site is to make working with them faster and more enjoyable — not to substitute for them. Pursuing a build is a long collaboration; the tools exist to make that collaboration easier to start, easier to sustain, and cheaper to course-correct.

Official Boulder County tools, staff, or determinations.

The Community Planning & Permitting Office is the authoritative source on every permitting matter in unincorporated Boulder County. This site will never try to be a permit submission portal, a decision authority, or a substitute for talking to staff directly.

Roadmap

Now · private beta

• Concept Generator. Upload a site photo, generate design concepts, rate them, and export a PDF contact sheet.
• Neighbor Voting. A shared gallery of generated concepts where neighbors can thumbs-up or thumbs-down each one, giving neighborhood input before expensive drawings get made. Voting is currently gated behind the private beta.
• Planning Assistant. Grounded Q&A against the Comprehensive Plan, Land Use Code, Fire Code, and amendments. Every claim links back to its source document.

Next

• Parcel-specific briefings. Enter an address and get a pre-application conference packet — a PDF showing how the code, plan, and fire code likely apply to the parcel, in the context of the neighborhood as the Assessor defines it.
• Parcel-specific data answers. Ask data-backed questions about a specific address — e.g., “what is the average permitting time for a house in my historic district?” or “how long did comparable Forestry-zoned SPRs take last year?” — grounded in ingested, de-identified county permit data.
• Connect with a vetted professional. A directory of licensed architects, engineers, and contractors the county itself can’t recommend, verified by approved permits and reviews from prior clients. The site matches a project to professionals with a track record on similar sites.
• Verified neighbor voting. Thumbs tied to a verified neighbor address so the signal is real and free of brigading.

Later

• Public voting. Any visitor can thumbs-up or thumbs-down any concept. Verified neighbors’ votes carry the most weight, because their view is the one the project has to live with.
• Neighborhood discovery. Enter any Boulder County address and see the concepts proposed for build sites nearby — a public, low-friction way for anyone to see what their neighborhood is being asked to absorb.
• Comparables engine. Side-by-side briefings and timelines for the parcel against approved comparables in the defined neighborhood.
• Pre-application packet generator. A staff-ready PDF built from the assistant’s briefing, selected concepts, and the retained professional’s notes — handed to the planner at the pre-app instead of discovered during it.
• Live record integration. Read-only integrations with official Boulder County sources so the briefing updates when the record does — contingent on the relevant data being publicly available.

Built by

I’m Steve Tingiris. I own a Forestry-zoned parcel in Boulder County, and I’m in the middle of a full Site Plan Review for a replacement home. These tools came out of that process — built for my own use, published so the next applicant, the reviewers on the other side of the counter, and the neighbors who will live with the result can see what is already possible with a modest amount of AI tooling and a well-organized public record.

Before you use the tools

This is a prototype. boulderpermitting.com is not affiliated with Boulder County, not a product of the Community Planning & Permitting Office, and not endorsed by any government entity. Nothing on this site is legal, planning, or permitting advice, and nothing here should be relied upon for decisions about purchasing land, committing to a design direction, or as evidence that a permit will be issued. The Boulder County Community Planning & Permitting Office has the final say on any permitting matter. Please read the full disclaimer before using the tools.