PermitStack vs Shovels.ai: Which Building Permit API Is Right for You?

Both PermitStack and Shovels.ai provide building permit data via API. But they serve different markets, at different price points, with different tradeoffs. Here's an honest comparison to help you decide.

Quick comparison

Where Shovels.ai wins

Coverage. Shovels has raised $6.5M in venture funding and covers over 2,000 jurisdictions across 48 states with 180 million permits. That's an order of magnitude more than PermitStack's current 22 cities. If you need nationwide coverage or data from smaller cities and counties, Shovels is the only option.

Contractor enrichment. With 3+ million contractor profiles and integrations with Clay for sales enrichment, Shovels has a deeper contractor intelligence offering. They've built AI-powered entity resolution to match contractors across jurisdictions.

Enterprise data delivery. Shovels offers native Snowflake and BigQuery table shares for enterprise customers who want to run analytics on the full dataset without making API calls.

Where PermitStack wins

Pricing. This is the biggest difference. PermitStack starts at $0 with a free tier of 1,000 requests per day. Paid plans start at $49/month. Shovels starts at $599/month with no free tier and no self-serve option. For startups, side projects, and individual developers, the 12x price difference is the deciding factor.

Self-serve access. PermitStack gives you an API key in 30 seconds from the website. No sales calls, no demos, no procurement process. Shovels requires contacting their sales team. If you want to prototype something this weekend, PermitStack lets you start immediately.

Update frequency. PermitStack refreshes data daily from source portals. Shovels updates semi-monthly on the 1st and 15th with up to a week of processing time. For time-sensitive use cases like lead generation, daily updates mean fresher data.

Interactive docs. PermitStack provides auto-generated OpenAPI documentation at api.permit-stack.com/docs where you can try every endpoint in your browser. This makes integration significantly faster for developers.

When to choose PermitStack

PermitStack is the right choice if you're building a startup or side project and need to prototype with real permit data quickly, your budget is under $500/month, you only need data from major U.S. metros (NYC, Chicago, LA, Austin, SF, Seattle, Boston, and 8 more), you want to start building today without a sales process, or you need daily-updated data for lead generation.

When to choose Shovels.ai

Shovels is the right choice if you need nationwide coverage across 2,000+ jurisdictions, you're an enterprise buyer with budget for $599+ per month, you need Snowflake or BigQuery delivery for analytics at scale, you need deep contractor enrichment with contact information, or you're building an insurance or lending product that requires broad geographic coverage for compliance.

The honest take

Shovels has more data. PermitStack costs less and is faster to start with. They're not really competing for the same customers. An enterprise insurance company building an underwriting model across all 50 states needs Shovels. A proptech startup building an MVP, a solar company generating leads in specific metros, or a developer exploring permit data for the first time needs PermitStack.

Both products serve the same underlying insight: building permit data is valuable, fragmented, and painful to access directly from municipal portals. The market is large enough for both approaches.