If something here is not clear, or you want to ask before you pay, email hello@planalerts.co.uk.
Yes. Planning applications are published by councils on purpose — anyone may read them, and neighbours are invited to comment on them. We read the same public registers you could read yourself, one council at a time, and we link every alert back to the council's own page.
Council planning registers, and public planning open data built on those same registers under the Open Government Licence. Distance searches use public postcode and boundary data. If a council publishes something wrongly, our copy will be wrong too — that is why the original link is always there.
Check for yourself before you pay. Our coverage page lists every UK planning authority, how many applications we hold for each, and names the ones we cannot see yet. We would rather tell you about a gap than take your money and hope.
Start free — watch one area with no card and see the real volume around you first. If you do subscribe and we send you no matching applications in your area during your first paid month, tell us within 14 days of that month ending and we will move you to a different area, or refund that month if you would rather. One per customer, first paid month only.
Any time, in one click from your account. Cancelling stops the next payment and your alerts run to the end of the period you have already paid for. No phone call, no notice period.
No. We write the letter about that specific job, you edit it if you want to, and you print and post it. Keeping it in your hands means the wording, the timing and the signature are genuinely yours — which is the reason it works.
Never. You get what the council publishes — the site address and the proposal, plus the agent's details where the council itself publishes them. We do not build or sell contact lists, and homeowners can ask us to remove their application from the site at any time on our removal page.
The summaries and the trade guesses are produced automatically from the council's own description of the work, and the job-value figures are estimates, not quotes. Treat them as a way to sort your morning, not as gospel — the council listing behind every alert is the authority.
Two moments matter. When the application goes in, they are still deciding who to use. When it is approved, the work is about to start and the budget is real. We tell you about both, and time the alert to your trade — groundworks first, roofing a couple of months later, kitchens and windows later still.
Daily or weekly, your choice, and never an empty email. Each alert covers only the new applications that match your areas and your trade since the last one.
Watch one area free, with no card, and judge it on what actually lands in your inbox.