Technology
Permits should not take longer than the build.
PermitX is a reading machine for drawing sets. It takes the set you were going to file, tests it against the provincial code and the municipal bylaw that apply to that address, and hands back the list a reviewer would have sent you. This page is what is underneath that.
By the numbers
Four figures, and where each one comes from.
One is our own speed, one is the law, one is a real set we screened and one is a count of Ontario. There is no accuracy percentage on this page, because no compliance tool has earned one.
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under 0 sec
To read a set
Upload the drawings and the findings come back while you are still at the desk, not after a meeting about scheduling the review.
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0 days
The clock you are betting
Ontario gives a municipality ten business days to review a house. What that clock does not cover is the second lap: corrected drawings go back into the queue behind everything that arrived while you were redrawing.
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Findings on a finished set
The last real set on this site was complete and ready to file. Six items came back, and not one of them was a design decision.
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Ontario municipalities
Every one of them is accepted today and returns an Ontario Building Code report. Zoning bylaws are loaded municipality by municipality.
What it reads
It reads the sheet, not a form about the sheet.
This is what a permit sheet is: a proposed elevation with its own dimension strings, a window schedule, general notes and an area summary. Every number that decides whether this project is approved is somewhere on it, and three of them are missing.
The area summary gives gross floor area and nothing about lot coverage. The notes column specifies beam sizes and never says what the beams are made of. The basement band is drawn but no window sizes are called out, so egress cannot be confirmed from this sheet.
None of those are mistakes in the design. They are the three most ordinary reasons a house permit comes back, and all three are findable by reading the drawing carefully enough. That is the entire job PermitX does, at the speed of a file upload rather than the speed of a plans examiner’s queue.
See the whole reviewThe platform
Architects, designers, builders and cities.
The same six things have to be true whether a two person design studio is filing one house or a building department is receiving four hundred applications a year.
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AI powered permitting
A drawing set is not a form. It is line work, dimension strings, schedules, notes and a titleblock, and the meaning is spread across all of them. PermitX reads the set the way a plans examiner reads it: it pulls the dimensions, the openings, the assemblies and the areas off the sheets themselves, then reasons about them against the rules that apply to that address.
No remodelling, no export step, no template to fill in. The set you were going to file is the input.
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Automated code, zoning and bylaw compliance
Two bodies of rules decide whether a permit is issued and they are written by different governments. The Ontario Building Code is provincial and governs how the building performs: egress, occupancy, fire separation, barrier free, Part 9 housing. The zoning bylaw is municipal and governs whether the building is allowed to be there at all: use, setbacks, coverage, height. PermitX runs both against the same set.
The code half reaches all 444 Ontario municipalities today. The zoning half is loaded bylaw by bylaw, in full rather than approximated, and a department that asks for its own goes to the front of the queue.
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Faster approvals
Nothing here makes a municipality read faster, and any tool that claims to is selling you something it does not control. What it changes is how many times you go through the queue. A set that clears first pass is reviewed once. A set that comes back with comments is redrawn, refiled, and reviewed again from the start, and the second wait is the same length as the first.
Fewer revisions and less back and forth, because the corrections happen before the file is opened rather than after.
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Seamless user experience
Three steps, in order: send in the submission, drawings and write-ups and application forms together; it gets read against the rules for that address; the findings come back. Every finding is pinned to the sheet it came from, so the fix starts at the drawing rather than at a comment you have to decode.
It runs inside Quoto Build, so there is no second login, no second bill and no exporting between two tools.
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Advanced data security
Drawing sets are client property and some of them are unbuilt commercial work, so they are handled as confidential by default. Traffic is encrypted in transit, files are held in encrypted cloud storage, and access is role based, so who inside an organisation can open a project is a setting rather than an honour system.
For a municipal deployment, the specifics of retention, residency and access review belong in writing. Ask us for them and you get them.
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Real time information
A compliance tool is only as current as the rules inside it, and the rules move. Code amendments are issued and zoning bylaws are amended, so a set tested against last year’s text comes back with answers that are confidently wrong. PermitX reads from maintained sources, which means a set screened today is screened against the text in force today.
Where a rule has changed recently enough to matter, the report says so rather than quietly using the new one.
Maintained, not snapshotted
The rules under a city change. A stale check is worse than none.
Every zoning bylaw PermitX loads is loaded in full and kept current alongside the Ontario Building Code. Both are maintained rather than snapshotted, because a setback tested against a superseded schedule produces a confident answer that a reviewer will overturn, and a confident wrong answer is the only outcome a compliance tool cannot survive.
That is also why zoning is added one municipality at a time and said out loud. Where a bylaw has not been read, PermitX returns a provincial code report and tells you that is what it is.
What is covered today
Data security
The drawings are not ours, and the product is built that way.
A drawing set is a client’s property and sometimes an unannounced project. Four commitments, in plain language, and all four are things you can ask us to put in writing before you upload anything.
Encrypted in transit and at rest
Uploads travel over encrypted connections and sets are held in encrypted cloud storage rather than on a working disk somewhere.
Role based access
Who inside your organisation can open a project is a setting, not a convention. A department can separate intake from review.
Your set is not a training set
Client drawings are handled as confidential work product. If you need that as a written term before a deployment, ask and you get it.
One platform, one account
PermitX runs inside Quoto Build, so there is no second vendor holding a second copy of the same drawings.
Put a set you have already filed through it.
PermitX runs inside Quoto Build. Upload a set the city has already seen, and find out whether it agrees with the reviewer.