Groundwork vs Shovels.ai
Shovels is a national permit-data platform built for teams with an API budget. We are a weekly email for a two-to-ten person shop.
Shovels.ai — from ~$599/mo
- Published pricing starts around $599/mo, and the useful tiers are sales-gated
- National coverage, a real API, contractor histories and analytics
- Built for suppliers, insurers and enterprise sales teams
- You do the filtering, the scoring and the delivery yourself
- Annual commitments are the norm at that level
Groundwork — $39/mo
- $39/mo, self-serve, card on file, cancel in one click
- No API to integrate and nothing to build — it is an email on Tuesday
- Already filtered to your trade, your region and the early-stage permits
- Built for the contractor who is on a roof at 7am, not for a data team
- A handful of San Diego jurisdictions, and we publish the exact weekly volume of each
The short version
If you have an engineer and a national territory, Shovels is the right tool and we are not competing for that. If you are a licensed contractor in San Diego who wants fifteen addresses on a Tuesday, $599/mo is not a rounding error.
What you get here for $39
- Up to 15 job sites every Tuesday — about $2.60 a lead.
- Address, scope, valuation, permit number, map, street view on each one.
- ${list(tierNames('A').map(escapeHtml))} leads are owner-pulled: an individual, one property, no contractor named on the permit.
- ${list(tierNames('B').map(escapeHtml))} are all new permits — those cities do not publish who pulled the permit, so we never call them owner-pulled.
- 77 qualified job sites a week citywide as of 2026-08-06. Real count, 7-day window.
See pricing Free samples first
Other comparisons
vs Permit Ledger · vs Angi · vs Thumbtack · vs Construction Monitor
Chad Vasquez · Groundwork, a Prompt Flow LLC company · San Diego, CA
(760) 464-5105 · chad@promptflowbusiness.com
A small San Diego operation, not a lead-gen call centre. Day job's a fireman; this is the side business. You can phone the number above and I will pick up. Cancel anytime in one click — no retention script, no website upsell. Billing is Stripe; the Tuesday email goes out through Resend.