ATTOM is the established leader in comprehensive real estate data — 158M+ properties, 30+ data products, used by financial institutions and proptech enterprises. PermitStack is the focused alternative: if all you need is permits, you shouldn't be paying for AVMs, ownership records, and 25 other datasets you won't use.
API key in 2 minutes. Permits-focused pricing. Cancel anytime.
ATTOM bundles permits with assessor records, AVMs, foreclosures, ownership, schools, demographics, and more — built for integrated real estate intelligence. PermitStack does permits. If the rest of the bundle isn't part of your product, you're overpaying for ATTOM.
PermitStack publishes every tier price publicly. ATTOM offers a 30-day trial; post-trial pricing is negotiated based on your data products, volume, and delivery method. Our entry price is typically less than ATTOM's smallest package starting point.
PermitStack ingests from city portals daily at 3 AM UTC. ATTOM's documentation states building permits are updated monthly. For time-sensitive applications — solar outreach, insurance renewals, contractor lead capture — daily data meaningfully outperforms monthly.
Side-by-side comparison based on publicly documented capabilities of each platform. All ATTOM data points are from attomdata.com and api.developer.attomdata.com as of April 2026.
| Feature | PermitStack | ATTOM |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Free → $49/mo | 30-day trial, then enterprise quote |
| Public pricing tiers | ✓$0 / $49 / $149 / $499 | —Custom quotes only |
| Free trial | ✓Permanent free tier, 1,000 req/day | ✓30-day trial |
| Product focus | Building permits only | 158M properties, 30+ data products |
| Data refresh | Daily (3 AM UTC) | Monthly |
| Official Python SDK | ✓pip install permitstack |
—No official SDK on PyPI |
| Interactive API docs | ✓OpenAPI / Swagger UI | ✓Developer portal |
| REST API access | ✓Self-serve | ✓Self-serve (trial), enterprise (prod) |
| U.S. jurisdiction coverage | 54 cities / 27 states | 2,000+ building departments |
| Total permits indexed | 15.6M+ permits | 200M+ permits |
| Property-level intelligence | —Permits-focused | ✓AVMs, tax, ownership, etc. |
| Contractor data | Via /v1/contractors endpoints | Included in permit records |
| Billed by | Stripe, monthly / annual | Annual license typical |
| Self-serve cancellation | ✓Stripe Customer Portal | Contact account manager |
| Long-term contract required | No — month-to-month | Annual typical |
| AI enrichment | ✓Claude-based parsing | ✓Proprietary EDMP pipeline |
| Bulk data delivery | ✓Parquet, weekly from $149 | ✓Cloud delivery, bulk licensing |
ATTOM product capabilities sourced from publicly available pages on attomdata.com, api.developer.attomdata.com, and their developer documentation as of April 19, 2026. PermitStack is an independent company and is not affiliated with ATTOM Data Solutions. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
ATTOM's strength is breadth. Their pricing reflects the value of the whole data ecosystem — assessor records, AVMs, ownership history, school data, demographics, POIs, foreclosures, transaction records. If your product uses three of those, great. If it uses one (permits), you're subsidizing the other 29 in every invoice.
A solar installer generating leads from roof permits cares about what was issued yesterday, not last month. An insurance carrier assessing risk on a recent renovation needs current data, not a 30-day-old snapshot. PermitStack's daily refresh cadence is a meaningful advantage over ATTOM's monthly update cycle for any time-sensitive workflow.
You see our price before you sign up. $49 is $49, not "$49-ish depending on how much you use and which packages you enable." No sales calls, no contract negotiations, no procurement process. If it's not working, cancel it in the Stripe portal. Try doing that with an annual enterprise real estate data license.
pip install permitstack gets you a typed Python client with automatic retries, pagination, and Pydantic models. ATTOM has a solid developer portal but doesn't publish an official SDK on PyPI — integration typically means writing raw HTTP calls yourself. Small thing, but meaningful for dev velocity.
For a pure-permits use case, this is all you need:
pip install permitstack
from permitstack import Permitstack
with Permitstack(api_key="pk_your_key") as client:
# Permits issued in the last week for solar in Phoenix
result = client.permits.search_permits(
city="Phoenix",
state="AZ",
category="SOLAR",
issued_after="2026-04-12",
)
for permit in result.results:
print(permit.address, permit.contractor_name, permit.estimated_value)No property lookup wrapper, no multi-package authentication, no AVM endpoint you don't need. Just permits.
We genuinely recommend ATTOM for those scenarios. PermitStack isn't trying to be a real estate data platform. We're the focused option for teams whose core need is permit data and who don't want to pay for a bundle they won't use. Both models have legitimate customers — they're just different products.
ATTOM is a comprehensive real estate data platform covering 158M+ properties across 30+ data products — assessor records, AVMs, ownership, mortgage, foreclosure, schools, demographics, and building permits, among others. PermitStack is focused exclusively on building permit data. If you need integrated property intelligence, ATTOM is the established choice. If you only need permits and don't want to pay for datasets you won't use, PermitStack is the focused alternative.
ATTOM doesn't publish specific pricing tiers publicly. They offer a free 30-day trial of their API, after which pricing is negotiated based on the data products you need, request volume, and whether you want API access or bulk/cloud delivery. Enterprise annual licenses are typical. PermitStack publishes every tier: Free, $49, $149, $499 per month, billed self-serve via Stripe.
ATTOM covers 200M+ building permits from 2,000+ building departments nationwide, representing roughly 94% of the top U.S. cities, with monthly updates. PermitStack currently covers 54 U.S. cities with 15.6M+ permits, with daily updates. ATTOM wins decisively on breadth and historical depth; PermitStack is fresher for the cities it covers and priced at a fraction of the cost.
Three main reasons: (1) Focused pricing — you only pay for permit data, not a bundle of 30+ real estate datasets. (2) Faster refresh — daily updates vs ATTOM's monthly cadence matters for time-sensitive use cases like solar lead generation and insurance underwriting. (3) Transparent, self-serve billing — you can sign up, pay, and cancel without talking to anyone. If your use case is "I need to see permits issued yesterday, not 30 days ago, and I don't need AVMs or ownership data," PermitStack is the better fit.
ATTOM's developer portal mentions code examples in multiple languages but does not publish an official maintained SDK on PyPI. Developers typically integrate via direct HTTP calls. PermitStack publishes an official Python SDK (pip install permitstack) with sync/async support, Pydantic models, automatic retries, and pagination.
ATTOM is the better fit when you need integrated real estate intelligence — property characteristics, ownership, tax assessment, AVM valuations, and permits together in one dataset, cross-linked by their persistent ATTOM ID. It's also the right choice if you need truly national permit coverage (94% of top cities) or 10+ years of historical depth. For enterprise real estate, mortgage, or insurance analytics, ATTOM's integrated data graph is hard to replicate.
Yes — many teams do. A common pattern is to use ATTOM for property-level intelligence (ownership, valuation, historical transactions) and PermitStack for high-frequency, permit-specific lookups where freshness matters. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
If you're using ATTOM specifically for permit queries, the migration is straightforward. The core fields (address, permit number, category, status, contractor, value, dates) map directly. ATTOM's /allevents and /buildingpermits endpoints have analogous coverage in PermitStack's /v1/permits/search and /v1/properties/{address}/history endpoints. Contact support@aisaasfactory.io if you need help mapping fields from a current ATTOM integration.
If your product needs building permit data and nothing else, stop paying for everything else. Sign up, verify your email, make your first API call in two minutes. Cancel anytime.