An open platform for free, community-facing tools built on public data.
No PDFs. No logins. No spreadsheets.
Enter any address to pull HPD violations — severity breakdown, registration, owner info. Updated daily.
Search any landlord or LLC to see full violation history, portfolio size, and risk score across all properties.
Per-pupil spending, Title I funding, and PTA contributions across 1,800+ NYC public schools. Searchable.
Look up executed marshal evictions for any address across all five boroughs. Know before you sign a lease.
Every 311 request filed at an address — noise, heat, pests, plumbing — with agency assignments and resolutions.
Searchable directory of free and low-cost services — food pantries, legal aid, after-school — by neighborhood.
Developers, students, and nonprofits build tools on top of public data — free, open-source, and focused on a real civic need.
Tools are submitted to CivicByte with a repo link, data sources, and a description of who they serve.
We check against four standards: solves a real problem, free & open, usable by non-technical people, actively maintained.
Listed tools appear in the directory, indexed by topic and borough, so communities can actually find them.
Every line of code is public. Civic tech built behind closed doors defeats its own purpose.
Every project starts with a real problem identified by a real community — not by us.
If a tool needs technical expertise to use, it has failed. Built for parents, organizers, advocates.
CivicByte isn't one team's portfolio. It's a shelf where anyone can contribute tools that serve the public.
A tool used by one PTA is worth more than a demo with a thousand GitHub stars.
Being student-founded doesn't mean amateur. Production standards because communities depend on us.
Overdue fees. Penalties stacked on penalties. Charges no one could explain — addressed to a man who wasn't there to read them.
My grandmother tried to figure out why the city was billing him. She couldn't. The records technically existed on NYC's open data portal — you just had to know which dataset to pull, how to filter it, and what the codes meant. Public, but not usable.
CivicByte exists in that gap. We turn the data the city already publishes into tools a tenant, a parent, or a grandmother can actually use — and we treat the work like it matters, because for someone out there, it does.
— Founding note · NYC, 2025Built a civic tool, or want to? Submit it to CivicByte and we'll help communities find it — or start from one of our open briefs.
If your community is stuck working around an open data gap, tell us. We prioritize problems that already have people trying to solve them by hand.