We measure success by community impact, not GitHub stars. Here's how the tools on CivicByte are being used — who's using them, what they've found, and what's changed.
Found 14 open HPD violations and three executed evictions in the prior 24 months. Kept looking. Saved a security deposit and a month of fighting to break a lease.
Used the School Budget Tracker to compare Title I allocations at their school against similar ones in the district. Brought the printout to a community ed council meeting.
Used Landlord Watch to map one portfolio's violation history. Story ran in a neighborhood paper; the office of the AG followed up a month later.
Pulled every 311 heat complaint on a single block over the last two winters. Showed up at doors already knowing which apartments had been calling — and which ones had stopped.
Assembled a 24-month violation and 311 record for a client's holdover defense in under an hour. Would have taken days of portal hopping otherwise.
Board members used the platform to build an overview of code violations on a proposed rezoning corridor. Testimony was specific instead of anecdotal.
I spent two weeks looking for this data in PDFs before I found your tool. It took five seconds.M. S.School Budget Tracker user
Landlord Watch is how we decide which buildings to canvass first.R. A.Housing advocacy org
"…one of the more useful civic tech projects to come out of NYC this year…"
Local news outlet · Feature on student-built tools
"Shared in three tenant-organizing Discords the week we launched."
Platform metrics · Referral sources
"Good example of usable open-data tooling, not another dashboard graveyard."
Civic tech newsletter · Weekly roundup
35M+ records indexed, 100+ complaint types. Fills the last major address-level gap in the housing data stack.
All five boroughs, 100k+ executed marshal eviction records. Becomes the most-shared tool in tenant-organizing channels.
The four-standard review process goes live. First external submissions accepted into the directory.
Portfolio-level search on top of HPD violations. Tools start being cited in local reporting.
The first CivicByte tool. Built in response to a PTA asking how to read their school's budget documents.
We don't have, and don't want, user accounts. That means we measure carefully: server-side request counts (aggregate, non-identifying), referrer patterns (which tenant forums, newsrooms, and advocacy sites are sending traffic), and direct testimonials from people who email, open GitHub issues, or mention us publicly.
Numbers on this page are conservative — rounded down, excluding bots, and only counting sessions that completed at least one search. When a metric is directional rather than precise, we say so.