AI Plan Review for Cities, Counties & Builders
We Have a Housing Crisis.
CrossBeam Solves It.
CrossBeam Permits is AI plan review software for city and county building and planning departments. Builders use the same engine as Pre-Check to check their plans before submittal. Two sides of the counter, one review. AI drafts, your people approve.
Just have a permit question? Ask the CrossBeam Permit Assistant →
Hundreds of pages. Months of work. Compressed into hours.
A builder’s full plan set lands at the city — watch CrossBeam work the loop.
Demo results: 132 sheets read; 2 corrections, 1 flag promoted to a correction by staff, 1 pass. 1. Common wall rating not shown (CRC R302.2.2, Sheet A-2.1) — correction. 2. Window U-factors not scheduled (CEC 160.1(e), Sheet A-6.0) — flagged by the engine, promoted to a correction by staff. 3. Side setback meets zoning (AMC §18.06.090, Sheet A-1.0) — pass. 4. Stair riser exceeds maximum (CRC R318.7.5.1, Sheet A-4.2) — correction. Round 1: the city sends the corrections letter. The builder fixes every item with CrossBeam Corrections Analysis and resubmits. Round 2: the city verifies each fix and approves. The letter, the fixes, the verification — approved in two rounds, every step through CrossBeam.
1st Place — Anthropic’s Claude Code Hackathon 2026 · 13,000 applicants
How It Works
Four steps. A human always reviews before anything goes out.
- 1
Upload Plans
Drag and drop a plan set or a corrections letter. PDF, any size.
- 2
AI Reviews
CrossBeam reads every page and cross-references California law and your city or county code.
- 3
Draft Generated
A corrections letter — or a builder’s pre-check report before submittal — drafted with code citations and sheet references.
- 4
Human Reviews
Your staff reviews, edits, and approves. Nothing goes out without a human sign-off.
Same Engine, Both Sides.
Everything above runs on CrossBeam Pre-Check — one review engine, purpose-built for plan check, that reads a plan set sheet by sheet the way a plan checker does. Around it, five tools that carry a permit from first question to final sign-off.
CrossBeam Pre-Check
Core · Cities, Counties & BuildersEvery finding comes back as a fail or a flag — with the code section and the sheet it lives on. Fails go in the letter; flags go to your staff’s judgment.
Explore Pre-Check
Around the Engine
One Plan Set, Two Timelines
Both sides lose. CrossBeam is on the side of more housing, built faster, built to code.
- 90%+ of plan sets get corrections in San Jose — Mercury News.
- 35,800 fewer local-government workers than in 2020 mean fewer plan-check hands — UC Berkeley Labor Center.
- Consultant re-review runs $150–175 per hour; the city eats $300–625 per correction round.
- A 6-month permitting delay costs a builder about $30,000 in lost rent, inflation, and loan carry.
- 429,503 ADU permits filed in California since 2018 — Shovels.ai.
- A CrossBeam Pre-Check runs in about 30 minutes. The city still reviews — you skip the correction rounds and approval lands around Month 2 instead of Month 6.
Watch the video that won the entire Anthropic hackathon.
Full corrections analysis on a real Placentia ADU permit — 14 items parsed, verified, and responded to.
CrossBeam Permits builds AI plan check around each agency’s own team, rules and workflow. It covers both sides of the counter. Applicant-facing tools check plans before they are submitted. Internal tools handle intake screening, building and planning plan review, corrections letters on the agency’s letterhead, backchecks and staff questions. Your staff edits, approves, and decides.
CrossBeam works with cities, counties and agencies anywhere in the country. CrossBeam is available to every California city and county, and most California jurisdictions already have their local rules loaded. Beyond California, CrossBeam already runs reviews on local code in the Greater Seattle, Las Vegas, Denver and Kansas City areas.
The City of Laguna Beach and the City of Buena Park use it today. The Laguna Beach City Council unanimously approved a 12-month agreement with CrossBeam Permits on August 4, 2026. The City’s staff report lists the cost as $99,600. The City of Buena Park funds a free, voluntary applicant pre-check, “Buena Park Plan PreCheck by CrossBeam”, launched October 5, 2026.
No. Staff make every decision. CrossBeam prepares findings with evidence. A reviewer accepts, edits, or dismisses each one. Nothing from a review goes to an applicant until your staff sends it.
CrossBeam loads the agency’s public rules before day one, then adds the checklists and judgment calls only staff know. Each agency gets its own setup. The rule set starts from your local code, handouts, and standard details, on top of state law, and your staff’s rulings are folded back in as we work with you, so the review matches how your counter works.
CrossBeam runs alongside your permit system. Nothing has to be replaced. For Bluebeam, you download a PDF with every finding placed as a markup, and you work in Bluebeam as usual. Upload the marked-up PDF, and CrossBeam reads your markups back into the findings and the letter.
Pricing depends on your permit volume and how you take submittals. Talk to us and we will scope it with you.
AI answers from CrossBeam’s own product information. For a code question, use the Permit Assistant.
Try It Right Now
Ask the Permit Assistant anything about California permits — setbacks, height limits, sprinklers, what permit your project even needs. It’s grounded in 16,000+ pages of state code and the local rules of 549 jurisdictions.