Permit Verdict vs PermitGrab

PermitGrab is the biggest company in this category and covers many times more cities than we do. If breadth is what you need, that sentence is the whole comparison and you should go and buy theirs. This page is for the contractor who works one metro and wants to know whether the smaller, narrower option is better for that job.

Everything below about PermitGrab was read from their own public pages on 9 August 2026 and is quoted as they wrote it. We have not audited it, we do not have inside knowledge of their product, and prices change — check theirs before you decide.

What is the same

Both sell leads derived from building permits filed with the city — a record of somebody who has already committed to a project, not a homeowner who filled in a "get quotes" form.
Both are monthly subscriptions, not pay-per-lead. Neither charges you per introduction.
Both let you cancel yourself without a phone call.
Both let you see real data before paying anything — the mechanics differ, see below.

What is different

	Permit Verdict	PermitGrab
Coverage	7 metros: San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans. That is the entire list.	Hundreds of cities. The count published on their own pages ranges from 444 to 1,061 depending on which page you read — homepage, pricing, about and a comparison post all carried different figures on 9 August 2026, so we quote the range rather than choose one.
Price	$99/mo shared · $299/mo exclusive	$149/mo, one tier. permitgrab.com/pricing, 9 August 2026
Exclusivity	$99 is shared — other contractors in your trade can buy the same metro. $299 is the tier that takes a metro and trade off the market, held by one contractor at a time.	No exclusive tier offered. permitgrab.com/pricing, 9 August 2026
Free look, no signup	A 5-row live preview of any metro and trade — the same query your paid feed runs, stopped at five rows. No account, no card, no email.	A free permit lookup, plus up to 10 contractor phone numbers unmasked with no signup. their city pages, 9 August 2026
Trial	We do not run one. The free 5-row preview stands in for it, is available on every metro and trade, and does not expire.	14-day free trial, no card required. permitgrab.com/pricing, 9 August 2026
Refunds	We do not offer refunds. Cancel yourself at any time and the charges stop.	Publishes a 30-day money-back guarantee. their site, 9 August 2026
Freshness	Read live from the city’s open-data portal every time the page loads. There is no copy of the data on our side to go stale.	Indexed permit counts shown per city; refresh cadence is described as daily. their city pages, 9 August 2026
Trade filtering	The feed is sold per trade, and the filter that builds it is the same one behind every free page on this site — so what you saw is what you bought.	16 trade subpages beneath each city page. their city pages, 9 August 2026
Declared value	The budget the owner declared to the city is on the row, and you set the budget band on your own feed link.	Total project value shown in their contractor directory. permitgrab.com/contractors, 9 August 2026
Contact details	Where the city names the contracting business and its licensing board publishes a business number, you get that. Not every city does, and we say so before you buy rather than after. Never a homeowner’s number.	Contractor phone numbers, masked until revealed, with a free allowance before signup. their city pages and directory, 9 August 2026

What PermitGrab does well

Worth saying plainly, because a comparison page that finds nothing good about the competitor is an advertisement.

Breadth we cannot match. Hundreds of cities against our seven. If you work anywhere outside our list, we have nothing to sell you and they very likely do.
A genuinely generous free surface. Permit lookup and a run of contractor phone reveals before anyone asks you for an email is more than most of this category gives away, ours included.
A no-card trial. Fourteen days with nothing to cancel is a lower-risk way to evaluate a product than any free preview.
Published sourcing. They document where their data comes from and how it is assembled, which is not universal in this market.

Where we would tell you to buy theirs

Your metro is not one of our seven. This is the common case, and it is not close.
You want a phone number attached to as many contractors as possible, and you want it as the core of the product.
You work several cities across a state, or follow work between metros.

Where we think we are the better buy

You work one of our seven metros and want depth in it rather than a wide index. We cover seven because we will not sell a city we cannot fill — below 12 permits in 30 days we refuse the sale outright rather than take $99 for an empty page.
You want the number before you pay. Our availability check counts your exact metro and trade by running the feed, and shows you that count next to the price. If it is thin, it says so and blocks the sale.
You want the metro closed. $299/mo takes your metro and trade off the market while you hold it. There is no equivalent tier on a $149 flat plan.
You care about the declared value — filtering to the jobs whose budget matches the work you want, rather than reading every permit in the city.
$99 against $149 if the shared tier is all you need. Whether that is the cheaper deal per permit depends entirely on your metro and trade: run the number.

Check it yourself

Five live rows for your metro and trade, free, with no account. If ours looks thin next to theirs for your city, that is a real answer and you should act on it.

Show me the permits in my city — free →

Sources. All read 9 August 2026: permitgrab.com, /pricing, /about, /contractors, and their city pages. Figures are theirs, quoted, not audited by us. Something out of date or wrong? Write to support@permitverdict.com and we will correct it and date the correction.

What do contractor leads cost? Browse live permits by city Pricing