From the field
Real permits, real people. Debriefs from the builders, designers, and homeowners getting projects through California building departments — and what their plan sets taught us.
A finished review handed you flat sheets and a flat map. Now flip the map to 3D and the property stands up in its real neighborhood.
Flip the site map inside a completed review to 3D and the flat basemap becomes the actual property — orbit it, tilt it, read the slope and the neighbors before you decide.
The review now reads the calc workbook, the Word letter, and the scanned form clipped to your plans — and never quietly skips the one file it couldn't open.
The lighting-control note, the caisson that doesn't match its own calc — the small print a busy checker skims now gets read before the set reaches the counter.
When a city's handout demands more than the code, the review checks the demand against the ordinance itself — and a barrier the law never wrote never becomes a correction.
The review doesn't just read each sheet — it checks the sheets against each other, and catches a set that disagrees with itself before the city ever sees it.
A finding you don't have to take on faith — click it and the sheet zooms to the exact region it's flagging, so you can check the spot yourself.
The Laguna Beach City Council approved a twelve-month partnership with CrossBeam. Here's what we're building together — completeness screening in 30 days, AI plan review in 90, and a public bar to clear.
A city plan reviewer never has to leave Bluebeam — the review's findings arrive pinned to the plan set, and whatever they change there carries back.
Before you ever file, you can ask what a permit will cost and get back an itemized estimate read from your city's own adopted fee schedule.
A change you ask for comes back as a proposal you can see and approve — your findings and your letters are never edited behind your back.
An engineering firm came to CrossBeam to modernize review in a fast-growing region. Step one — grab the code — hit a wall: the code that governs there isn't online or even on paper. It lives in the memory of the people who sat through years of council meetings. So it got written down.
Inside every CrossBeam project is a Share button — copy the link, text it to your contractor, and they open straight to what the review found, no login wall and no seat to buy.
A city reviewer finishes the review and the letter is already on the department's letterhead, in its voice, structured its way — no reformatting between the review and the envelope.
Hand over a city's correction letter and the plan set, and get back every item in plain language, tied to the code behind it, and drafted into a response you can act on.
A finding that points at what's actually drawn on the sheet — this wall, this dimension, this cell — not at a sentence in the notes.
A homeowner in Hermosa Beach drew a five-sheet permit set with a tape measure, a notebook, and Claude Code in a single evening. Then he ran it against the current California code.
Cameron charges $300 to show up. One site visit produces three documents and a mapped job — and then the system hits the one part nobody can systemize.
Mario designed the ADU to the maximum, got what he thought was a green light — then Appendix F and a utility easement no public map shows cost him two months and a full redesign.
Cameron pulls up the letter mid-call — fourteen corrections from the City of Placentia on a single ADU, most of which could have been caught before the plans were ever submitted.