Permit Path
Permit Path support
Last updated 15 September 2026.
Permit Path keeps one permit application in one place: what each department asks for, which piece is sitting where, a warning before an approval lapses, and a timeline built from how long these actually take rather than what the counter quotes.
Why an item says to ring the department
Every requirement carries a citation and the date a person last read it off a municipal code or a department's own form. Past roughly six months the app says the item is worth a phone call to confirm. Past a year it stops presenting it as the current rule at all and tells you to treat it as a starting point.
Departments reorganise, fees change and forms are replaced, and nothing about a database notices. Showing how old the research is, in the open, is the most an app can honestly do about a fact it cannot re-check on its own.
Why there is no timeline for my permit
The timeline is built from applications other people finished in the same jurisdiction for the same permit type. Below five finished applications, the app says it does not know rather than offering a number.
Why the timeline argues with itself
Where there is an estimate, it may be followed by a sentence saying that several applications are still waiting and have already run past it. That sentence is not a hedge, it is the correction.
A middle figure built only from finished applications cannot see the slow ones, because they have not finished, so they are not in the sample. The estimate therefore carries the count of open applications that have already exceeded it. The department's own quoted figure is shown beside it, and the gap between the two is most of the point.
Why an expiry warning did not arrive
Warnings about a lapsing approval are scheduled on your own phone rather than sent from a server, fourteen days and three days ahead. Three things follow:
- notifications have to be allowed for Permit Path, which you can do from the Account tab,
- a warning exists only for a step you marked approved and gave an expiry date,
- reinstalling the app or clearing its data loses the schedule until you open the app again, which rebuilds it.
Why a new requirement is not on my application
The checklist is copied onto an application when you start it. A requirement added to that jurisdiction afterwards does not appear on applications already running.
The permit type under Permits always shows the current list.
What Permit Path does not do
- It is not legal or code advice. Every requirement is a citation and a pointer, never an interpretation, and it cannot tell you whether your plans will pass.
- It files nothing and contacts no department. Nothing you enter is sent to a jurisdiction, and no jurisdiction can see your account.
- There is nowhere to put documents. Steps hold a status and your notes; the survey PDF lives wherever it already lives.
- Checklists cannot be edited inside the app. They are loaded by us from the sources they cite.
Your records
Stored: your email address, your timezone, and each application. That means what you called it, the address if you entered one, which items you have marked done or submitted, and any notes you wrote. Signing in is by a code emailed to you, so there is no password.
One thing leaves your own records, and it is two numbers. How many days an application took, or how many it has been waiting. That is what the shared timelines are built from. Your name, the address, what you called the permit and your notes are never part of it.
You can delete your account from the Account tab, and your timings go with it: an aggregate you cannot withdraw from is not one you agreed to. Deleting here withdraws nothing from a department, so anything actually filed stays filed.
Privacy
The full policy is at carrierpress.com/permitpath/privacy, and it names the one service involved: the host that keeps the database and sends the sign-in codes.
Contact
One person reads that, so a reply may take a few days.
Permit Path is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.