Help & FAQ

1. What is Agenda Insider?

Agenda Insider surfaces every pre-permit development signal a local general contractor would expect to see — sourced from planning commissions, city councils, economic development authorities, and county boards across 80 active regions in 23 states. Daily ingestion of municipal agenda PDFs, AI-extracted projects and contacts, and saved-search digests delivered by email so you see the deal before the permit is given.

The platform was built for the developer/builder/site-selector workflow: track a region, save a search, get an email when a new project hits the pipeline. No login required to keep getting the digest after you sign up.

2. How is the data collected?

A daily pipeline (14:00 UTC) pulls fresh agenda PDFs from county and city government portals across the platform. Each document is read by Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 model, which extracts: project names, addresses, applicants, contractors, planners, phone numbers and email addresses where present, project type, current action, and a few derived signals. Cost averages about $0.21 per document over the last 7 days. The hero badge on the homepage shows the most recent ingestion timestamp — refresh to see it tick.

For more on the extraction model and what the variance looks like in practice (high-confidence contacts converge run-to-run; edge-case contacts vary), see How We Read Agendas.

3. What are pre-permit signals?

"Pre-permit" means the development project is on a municipal agenda — being reviewed, voted on, or amended — but hasn't yet been issued a building permit. By the time the permit is issued, public construction-data services know about the project. Agenda Insider catches the project 60–90 days earlier, when it appears on a planning commission or city council agenda for a rezone, a site plan, a variance, or a development agreement.

For a builder or sub, this window is the difference between bidding on a known job and being among the first to know a job exists. The platform is designed for that early-window use case.

4. How do I add a region to my subscription?

1. Sign in and go to My Subscription.
2. Click Manage Regions (or visit /billing/account/regions directly).
3. Pick the region you want to add. Each additional region beyond your plan's included region is $50/month, prorated for the current billing period.
4. Confirm the change. Your next invoice reflects the proration.

Removing a region works the same way — visit the same page, deselect the region. Your subscription's region list updates immediately; Stripe prorates the credit on the next invoice.

First-region pricing: Every subscription requires $100 for the first or sole region. If you stop subscribing to your initial region but keep a second region, that surviving region becomes your new first-position region and runs at $100/month.

5. How do I cancel my subscription?

1. Sign in and go to My Subscription.
2. Click Payment & Billing — this opens the Stripe customer portal.
3. Click Cancel subscription. Confirm.

Cancellation is effective at the end of your current billing period — you keep access until the period ends, no refunds for the partial period. You can re-subscribe later via the pricing page if you change your mind; saved searches, watched projects, and account settings are preserved.

6. How do I update my email or payment method?

Payment method, billing address, invoice download: all handled in the Stripe customer portal. From /billing/account, click Payment & Billing. Stripe's portal lets you swap cards, update billing addresses, and download every past invoice.

Account email: A self-serve email-change form isn't exposed today. To change the email on your account, send a request from your current account email to aaron@agendainsider.com and Aaron will update it directly. (Sending from your current account email is how we confirm it's you.)

Password: use Forgot password to reset (request a token, click the email link, set a new password). An in-account password-change form is on the roadmap.

7. What does the "Action" filter mean?

On the Data Explorer, the Action filter (formerly labeled "Stage") narrows projects by the type of approval being sought at a meeting. The values are agenda-item actions, not project lifecycle stages — a single project can come up multiple times for different actions (e.g., first as a Rezoning, later as a Site Plan, later as a Final Plat).

The filter has 16 buckets. Each is a group of related raw values that get OR-matched server-side, including compound pipe-joined values from agendas where a single item involves multiple actions:

The 16 buckets cover roughly 70% of recent-90-day projects. Projects classified as a long-tail action (single-occurrence values, region-specific terminology) won't match any bucket today; broader bucketing is on the roadmap.

8. How do I save searches?

1. On the Data Explorer, set the filters you care about: regions, cities, project types, actions, recency, size thresholds.
2. Click Save Search. Give it a name. Pick the email cadence — Daily digest, Weekly digest, or No alerts (just save) — and the timezone the digest should be evaluated against.
3. Confirm. The search appears in your saved-searches sidebar; if you picked an email cadence, the first digest fires at the next cadence tick.

Digests fire at 5:00 AM in the timezone you selected on the saved search. You can edit the filters, change the cadence, or change the timezone at any time from the saved-search sidebar. Saved searches keep emailing you indefinitely with no login required — they're the platform's core retention mechanism.

9. When do email digests arrive?

Each saved search fires at 5:00 AM in the timezone you selected on the saved search, on the cadence you picked (daily or weekly). The platform runs two cron jobs that scan all saved searches: a daily run at 11:00 UTC (which catches every search whose timezone makes "now" 5:00 AM local) and a weekly run at 11:05 UTC (same logic, weekly searches only). You don't see the cron timing — you see the digest land in your inbox at 5 AM local.

If a search has zero matches in its window, the platform suppresses the email rather than sending an empty digest. If you stop seeing emails entirely and expect activity in your filter set, check that the search is still active and the cadence is set as you expect.

10. Do you offer refunds?

No refunds are issued after the 14-day trial period. New subscribers get a 14-day trial — cancel any time during the trial and there's nothing to charge. After the trial, cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid billing period; you keep access through the period you've already paid for, but no partial refund is issued for the unused portion.

Full terms in the Refund & Cancellation Policy.

11. Who do I contact for help?

For anything not covered here — billing questions, a missing project you expected to see, a region you'd like added, a partnership conversation — email Aaron directly: aaron@agendainsider.com. Real human, real response time, no ticketing system.

For a structured contact path see the contact page.