If knowing about a planning application early is worth money to you, somebody in your business is opening council websites one at a time and copying out what changed. It works. It also costs a day, every day, and it stops when that person is on holiday.
There is no single place to look. Each council runs its own planning portal, several of them on software that was old a decade ago, and none of them present an application the same way.
So the job is manual by default: open the portal, filter to the dates you care about, read what is new, decide whether it matters, copy the ones that do into a spreadsheet. Repeat for every council in your patch.
The work is not hard. It is that it has to happen every day, before anyone else has seen it, or the advantage is gone.
Search for planning data and you get subscriptions — national datasets sold monthly, priced per seat, covering what the vendor decided to cover. If your patch is their patch and their fields are your fields, that is a good deal. If not, you are paying monthly for a shape that does not fit.
What does it cover?
Monthly subscription
What the vendor covers. Adding a council outside their set is not something you can do.
A build you own
The councils you actually work in, including the awkward ones.
What does it tell you?
Monthly subscription
Their fields, in their format, filtered their way.
A build you own
What you asked for, in the shape your team already thinks in.
What happens when a council changes its portal?
Monthly subscription
They fix it when they fix it. You may not know it broke.
A build you own
The pipeline detects the change and tells you, rather than quietly returning nothing.
Who else has it?
Monthly subscription
Everyone who subscribes, at the same time as you.
A build you own
You.
What does it cost ongoing?
Monthly subscription
Per seat, per month, rising.
A build you own
Hosting and the sources it reads. The build is one-off.
The comparison worth making is not against the subscription, it is against the person. One working day a week of someone's time is about a fifth of a salary; one working day every day is a role. A custom build, from £3,000, against a job that size pays for itself inside the first year and keeps going.
When renting is the right answer
Subscribe when a national dataset genuinely covers your patch and you need it this month. Build when your patch is specific, when the portals you care about are the ones nobody covers well, or when the advantage you are buying is knowing something before the people who subscribe to the same feed.
PlusRooms had the daily trawl. We built the pipeline that reads the portals on a schedule, normalises what comes back so applications from different councils can actually be compared, and raises alerts on the ones that matter — with failure detection, so a council changing its portal surfaces as a problem rather than as silence.
The PlusRooms build, in full →Planning applications are public records and councils publish them deliberately. We read at a polite rate, identify ourselves, and respect what a site asks of automated clients. Where a council offers an API or a data download we use that instead of scraping.
It breaks, and the system says so. That is the part people underestimate: a scraper that quietly returns nothing is worse than no scraper, because the empty result looks like good news. Ours alert on a shape change rather than on an error.
A pipeline covering several portals with alerting and a dashboard is a custom build, from £3,000, fixed price agreed before we start. A single source feeding an existing sheet is from £500. Ongoing cost after that is hosting and whatever the sources charge.
Usually, yes — a CRM, a sheet, a database, or a dashboard we build alongside it. Feeding your existing system is generally the cheaper answer and we will say so if it is.
Count the hours the manual check takes and multiply by what that person costs. If you would rather have that written down properly, the £1,500 Process Audit does it, along with a fixed quote — credited in full against the build if you proceed.
Related: Planning data for property developers · Internal tools & dashboards · Spreadsheet automation
If you already know what you want built, describe it and you will get a fixed price. If you are weighing up whether it is worth building at all, the £1,500 Process Audit answers that in writing first — and is credited in full against the build if you go ahead.
What the audit covers →