Sprint launch week · turnaround 48–72 hrs

Send us a coordinate. We'll send you back the receipts.

A coordinate-specific environmental investigation brief — satellite imagery, atmospheric pollution data, permit records, public air-quality datasets, and media signals — assembled into a cited PDF with a chain-of-custody hash. For journalists, public-interest investigators, community groups, and law firms.

48–72 hr turnaround Cited evidence table SHA-256 chain-of-custody Free tier for community impact
Sprint pricing · Apr 27 – May 4

Four ways in. One deliverable.

Same evidence pipeline behind every tier. Pricing follows the buyer, not the data — journalists pay journalist rates, law firms pay packet rates, communities don't pay at all when there's a clear public-interest angle.

Tier 01 · launch only
Journalist brief
$99/ brief
Launch-week pricing for working journalists and academics. Full brief, smaller invoice — because reporters move first and we want them moving.
  • Coord-specific evidence brief
  • Satellite + atmospheric + permit signals
  • AskNews / GDELT media context
  • Cited evidence table
  • Sample-quality PDF + JSON
  • 48–72 hr turnaround
Pay $99 · journalist
Tier 02 · standard
Standard brief
$199/ brief
Public-interest investigators, ENGOs, researchers, consultants. Same brief, standard rate. No qualification needed.
  • Everything in journalist tier
  • Standard turnaround commitment
  • One revision pass included
  • Email support during fulfilment
  • Hand-off call optional
Pay $199 · standard
Tier 03 · rate-limited
Community brief
$0free
Free for community groups, frontline organisers, and individuals investigating impact in their own neighbourhoods. Manual approval. Capacity-limited.
  • Same data pipeline
  • Requires public-interest reason
  • Stated deadline + use case
  • Approved or routed to journalist tier
  • Best-effort turnaround
Apply · free tier
Tier 04 · evidence-grade
Law-firm packet
$500deposit · $1,500 total
Deposition-grade evidence packet. Citation graph, chain-of-custody hash, expert-review-ready formatting. Deposit secures scoping; balance on delivery.
  • Everything in standard brief
  • Citation graph (every claim → source)
  • SHA-256 chain-of-custody hash
  • Expert-review-ready format
  • Scoping call before fulfilment
  • Confidentiality on request
Pay $500 deposit · packet
⚠ Caveat
Ghost Permits briefs are investigation triage, not legal or scientific conclusions. The brief separates observed signals, public records, media context, confidence levels, and caveats. The output is designed to help a reporter or attorney decide what to verify next — records requests, source interviews, expert review, site-level follow-up. We do not certify illegality.
Inside the deliverable

Eight sections. One PDF. Every claim cited.

The brief is engineered to survive scrutiny. It says what we saw, when we saw it, which public dataset supports it, and how confident we are. Then it tells you the next three questions worth asking.

A redacted Memphis sample brief is public — the link cold emails point to:

View the Memphis sample →
Brief structureCLX-01.pdf
01 · Site summary
Coordinates, facility name if known, nearest community, downwind population, regulatory jurisdiction.
02 · Signal summary
What changed. When. Why it matters. Lead paragraph an editor can paste.
03 · Data sources
Sentinel-5P TROPOMI, Sentinel-2 L2A, MODIS, EPA ECHO, OpenAQ, GDELT, AskNews, parcel registries, court records.
04 · Evidence table
Claim → source → timestamp → confidence → URL. One row per finding.
05 · Visual appendix
Annotated tile crops, time-series charts, before/after frames, anomaly maps.
06 · Caveats
What the data does not prove. Known confounds. Cloud-cover gaps. Sensor limits.
07 · Chain of custody
SHA-256 hash of brief JSON + tile manifest + timestamp. Verifiable on request.
08 · Next questions
Three to five reporting / FOIA / interview / expert-review angles ranked by yield.
Format · PDF + JSON · Avg length 14 pp · Median citations 22
How we keep you out of trouble

Three things every brief gets, every time.

Because the worst outcome is a buyer publishing something we got wrong.

Triage, not verdict
We never call something illegal.
Briefs surface evidence. Determinations of compliance, intent, or liability stay with regulators, courts, and your editors. Every brief opens with this caveat.
Confidence per claim
Every row carries a confidence score.
High / medium / low — explicit, with reasoning. Sentinel-5P NO₂ at 7 km res with 2σ confidence is not the same as a parcel-record match. We don't pretend it is.
Reproducibility
Source URLs land in your inbox.
Tile dates, dataset versions, retrieval timestamps, query strings. If the public dataset disappears, we have your archived copy hashed in the chain-of-custody record.
Order intake

Send us a site.

Pre-pay above to skip the queue, or submit here and we'll route you to the right tier. Free-tier requests are reviewed manually — please include the public-interest reason.

Lat/lon decimal, full address, or Google Maps URL — we accept all three.
⏱ 48–72 hr turnaround · paid tiers prioritised
Honest answers to obvious questions

Frequently asked.

How reliable is the output?
We treat the output as an investigation lead, not a legal or scientific conclusion. Each claim carries a confidence score and a public-source URL. Where the data is ambiguous, we say so loudly. The brief is designed to help you decide what to verify next — records requests, source interviews, expert review, site-level follow-up — not to replace any of those steps.
Can I republish the brief?
Findings are yours to use in reporting, court filings, or community organising. We ask that you cite Ghost Permits as the source of the satellite/atmospheric analysis when material from the brief appears in published work. The brief PDF itself is licensed for your use; redistribution beyond your organisation requires permission.
What's the actual turnaround?
48–72 hours for paid tiers during sprint week. Standard turnaround once we're past launch is 5 business days. If a tile is unavailable due to cloud cover or sensor outage we'll tell you up-front and suggest the closest viable date.
What's the difference between a $199 brief and a $1,500 evidence packet?
The $199 brief is investigation triage — 14 pages, ~22 citations, suitable for first-look reporting decisions. The $1,500 packet adds: deposition-ready formatting, full citation graph (every assertion mapped to its source), expert-review-ready visual appendix, longer-form caveats section, and a confidentiality option. Lawyers usually want the packet; reporters usually don't need it.
Will you investigate any site?
Almost. We won't take work designed to harass private individuals or residential properties. We won't take work that's adversarial to communities (e.g. siting opposition research aimed at residents rather than infrastructure). We will take any industrial, commercial, or public-infrastructure target where the question is "is the public record accurate?"
Who's behind Ghost Permits?
A small team building public-interest satellite analytics. The pipeline runs LiquidAI's LFM2.5-VL for vision over Copernicus Sentinel data, with permit-record cross-referencing and agentic news enrichment. Methodology is fully published and reproducible — see the Methodology page.
I'm an editor. Can I get a newsroom subscription instead?
Yes — we're piloting a $299/month tier for monitoring up to 5 sites continuously, with weekly digest emails when something changes. It's not on the public order page yet because we want pilot newsrooms to help us shape it. Reply to the form noting you're an editor and we'll set up a scoping call.
I'm a lawyer. Confidentiality?
Yes. Standard packets ship with confidentiality on request — we won't list the matter as a case study, won't acknowledge the engagement publicly, and will sign a mutual NDA at the deposit stage. Reach out via the form.